


blow a kiss, fire a gun

by sictransitgloriamundi



Series: from the desk of Courier Six, representative of the Sovereign City of New Vegas [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas, Il buono il brutto il cattivo | The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Military Homophobia, Multi, Mutant Animals, Swords, but the shitty person IMMEDIATELY gets the tar beaten out of him, extended disarming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2020-05-12 12:21:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19229044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sictransitgloriamundi/pseuds/sictransitgloriamundi
Summary: Courier Six has three goals: build a better and less capitalist society, figure out how to grow food for the city, and get the reactor in the Lucky 38 running. Her friends' repressed feelings technically aren't her business.





	1. here and now

The mule train loomed out of the sandstorm, startling Courier Two. A quick and quiet conversation with Courier Thirteen while the mules whuffled and snorted and knocked their horns together, all trying to crowd into the scant shelter of the mouth of the canyon, and she had the saddlebag and was wriggling back through the narrow canyon, the roar of the sand far above her head softening to a hush. 

Courier Five rocketed along a dead elevated highway on a horse with too many legs and threw the saddlebag down to Courier Six-A on another sleipnir waiting underneath, who was gone across the horizon line by the time Five made their way down to the post office tucked under the bridge. 

Courier Nine caught the saddlebag and scrambled up the ladder, ducking a crate winching down. She kicked the lever for the signal bell and ziplined across the gorge with a whoop over slowly moving pallets on donkey-powered cargo pulleys. 

Courier Eleven maneuvered the flatboat into an eddy behind a boulder on the shores of the Colorado River and threw the saddlebag to Courier Twelve. She scrambled up the cliff face, heading for the Hoover Dam. 

Courier Twelve, on the last working motorcycle in the Mojave, roared into McCarran under workers taking down the NCR signage and putting up ones that said HOUSING, SOVEREIGN CITY OF NEW VEGAS, and just barely caught the 3:10 monorail into New Vegas proper. 

She stumbled off the train, legs still a little numb from the poorly maintained motorcycle, ducking between a tall man in a poncho and a woman carrying a crate of pigeons. 

Courier Six signed for her oddly shaped oilskin package with a scowl and a gigantic numeral 6 across half the page. 

Twelve frowned, opened her mouth, closed her mouth, decided not to push her luck and headed for the New Vegas post office.

Fussing with the straps on her own messenger bag, Six muttered “Is this how House felt? Finally getting something from very far away at great expense?” and then brightened when she saw the familiar poncho.

“Good, you made it. Where’s the other one?” 

Blondie nodded at Twelve, vanishing into an impatient crowd of letter writers. “Friend of yours?”

Successfully distracted, Six watched her elbow her way up the stairs and into the building. “No, I didn’t know her Before. First real mail run here since the Dam, I expect they’re a bit shorthanded.” 

She cocked her head, almost as if she were listening for something. 

Blondie gave her a minute and a half to look confused in the middle of the street before reaching out very slowly and carefully to guide her to a bench, when Six snapped out of it.

Smacking his hand away, “Huh. I remember being told one year I’d be going the whole way from Shady Sands to here -” and ended up wincing and scrubbing at her eyes, cradling her scarred temples.

“Walk me back to the 38?” she asked from under her hat. “Time’s precious today- you can use this walk to tell me where the fuck Angel is.”

Angel was already at the 38, availing himself of the tequila in the kitchen.

Six watched them nod tersely at each other while she snapped the strings on the package. 

She blinked at the hubcap-sized circle, a snake eating its own tail. “Now, I can see the value of having a machete but a sword? A real sword?”

It obligingly flicked back to a regular non-circular sword with a small inconvenient hilt as she drew it, and stayed straight as she slashed the air near the refrigerator experimentally.

Christine, nudging Rex out of the entryway, “Is that the sword?” 

“Well, it’s no Vault water chip, but it’ll do.”

“You’re a sucker for a pretty face.” she said disapprovingly. 

“Guilty as charged,” Six agreed, kissing her wife.

Rex sprang up with a terrible clatter of metal joints, and started barking half a second before a bone-deep rumble rattled the selection of tacky mugs above the sink.  

Christine, bolting for the elevator button, “North Freeside gate?”

Six dropped the sword on the table and grabbed her hat, “I don't- there's nothing OVER THERE- LET’S GO BOYS, YOU’RE ON THE CLOCK- REXIE, hush, come-”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here and now- a FNV perk title, lets you instantly level up again.
> 
> The package montage is heavily inspired by the Message Montage from The Rescuers Down Under. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBPRvOtgy9M . Bruce Broughton also composed the music for Silverado, one of my other favorite Westerns. imo the Mojave Express is one leg of a much larger Express service across NCR territory, so it took thirteen Couriers to get the sword from its original home somewhere near Dayglow all the way to New Vegas.
> 
> Horned mules (or hayburners) are from tumblr user scuttlebuttin. https://scuttlebuttin.tumblr.com/post/182926471598/a-courier-on-hayburner-back-delivering-mails-and  
> look if you're going to have a post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland full of weird things, the least you can do is more than five animals, two of which are just big bugs, CHRIS AVELLONE.
> 
> The snake sword is a real sword. https://wewastetime.com/2014/01/17/snake-rapier/
> 
> "A sword? A real sword?" is a MBMBAM bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb3kaAd8k3o
> 
> Vault water chip- the events of Fallout 1 revolve around finding a new controller chip for your Vault's water purification system. An incredibly valuable bargaining chip.


	2. bored with looking good

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> it's tuco!!! he's here!!!

Blondie, well behind cover, watched Six bounce up on top of the sandbags over the north gate and almost fall two stories with a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Neither she nor Angel were anywhere near enough cover. Christine had burrowed half into the wall, with just enough clearance for a holorifle. Rex paced below, snarling behind the gate. 

Six gestured pleadingly toward the one determined hinge holding everything together, then incredulously flung her arms wide at the group outside with an angry little shake of her head. “What, may I ask, the FUCK are you doing to my city?”

“Sold those supplies for your big-event wedding, Courier? Forgot about your allies in a haze of booze and sex and drugs?” yelled an irate brunette in heavy combat armor and a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. She led a half-dozen people in mismatched armor and military uniforms carrying an array of very big guns and a full complement of four hovering Mister Gutsies. 

“Raquel? I did  _ so _ send them! I have the receipt right here!” Raquel waited for Six to scrabble through her bag and hold a ragged piece of newsprint up, then shot it out of Six’s hand with a laser pistol. She overbalanced and fell off the top of the gate, but in the right direction onto the walkway. 

“Don’t shoot or I’ll shoot you  _ myself _ the gate won’t hold-” Six snapped at the guards anxiously starting to line up shots while Raquel screamed “That’s Master-at-Arms to you, savage!” and Rex lost his entire mind, certain that interesting things were happening outside but unable to get to them through the gate. 

Blondie had already picked his first three targets, confident Angel had the leftmost three covered. Christine would always take out the biggest threat to Six first, and they’d deal with the robots later. 

He was glad that was settled.  

Six sat back up on her heels and yelled back up over the barrier. “Well, now I DON’T have a receipt and and now it’ll be harder to figure this out with Cassidy Caravans- the fuck, Raquel!”

Blondie was distracted by Angel shifting position, and considered yelling at him to get better cover even if that meant he’d have to use something that wasn’t the overgrown pistol resting across his arm. This was really just a practical tactical suggestion, you kept an eye on your partner in situations like this. It would be terribly inconvenient to go back to one-man jobs. 

He was vaguely aware of Christine yelling at Six in the background over Rex barking frantically. “If you die by falling off this gate I’m going to make Arcade bring you back just so I can kill you again.” 

“I won’t-  _ please _ don’t do that.” Six hissed back over Raquel yelling something about how she should have known better than to trust a debauched savage and they should have never agreed to assist at the Dam. “We can give her the energy cells in the lobby bar if she pushes it.” 

She yelled back over to the second most dangerous angry woman in her vicinity, “Look- I sent the supplies over to Cass two days ago. If you shoot my gate again I’m gonna sic my killer robots on you!”

“If you kill me, Nellis will retaliate! Blow the top right off your casino!”

“That would only happen after you’re dead, and you wouldn’t be around to  _ see it  _ so what would the POINT even be of all that! There’s no need to waste missiles, let’s go talk to Cass and figure out what happened!”

* * *

 Cassidy, of the newly reorganized Cassidy Caravans, hadn’t had enough brahmin to carry seventy six boxes of energy cells out at such short notice, and had planned on taking half tomorrow. 

The Boomers left the old Crimson Caravan compound with as many boxes as they could carry, premeditated murder and continuing malice still on Raquel’s mind. 

Six frowned at an empty energy cell on the floor and kicked across the warehouse so hard it dented the corrugated sheeting wall. “Hate ‘em. Unstable.” 

It was unclear whether she was talking about the Boomers or the energy cells.  

“At least this is done with. We’ll never hear about it again because they’ll be too embarrassed to admit they made a mistake, so they’ll pretend it never happened. Maybe we  _ should _ reactivate the killer robots?” 

“My love, why are we letting the unstable xenophobes walk away with so much ammo?” 

“This is the last bit of their payment to show up to the Dam because we are genuinely out of missiles for the Red Glare, and it’s not like we go through a lot. They’re probably anxious because they went through three years’ worth of missiles in ten hours.”

Six held the door for Rex, who dropped the empty energy cell at Angel’s feet.

Blondie set his mouth in a grim line to prevent a smile from escaping when Angel obligingly chucked it across the caravan compound.  

He’d never seen Christine angry, but she was radiating menace like a mini nuke as she came back out into the sunlight. “Fuck that bitch.” 

“I’d really prefer you didn’t, but we’d have to have a Family Discussion with our other wife first.” She paused in the middle of putting her sunglasses back on and stared off into the middle distance. “Y’know, maybe Raquel  _ will  _ mellow a bit if she finds someone nice. She’d have to actually leave Nellis more than once a year though, didn’t get the sense there were too many other people like us there.”

“She needs to get over herself. You’re mine.”

Six laughed, a gleeful cackle that made the three brahmin in the pens raise their heads in mild alarm. “Yeah, should have thought about all the hearts you’d break across the Mojave when you married me. How dare you not consider all the enemies you’d make in your cost-benefit analysis.” 

 

* * *

Blondie and Angel had to listen to a full twenty minutes of gentle domestic ribbing as they walked back, and Angel had been trapped into a twenty-minute game of fetch. 

Ducking through the train car into Freeside proper, Six asked “Who in the good goddamn is on the roof?” 

Raul was on the roof, peacefully smoking. Veronica was suspended in a heavy radsuit, inspecting the undercarriage of the rotating bar floor and burning off chunks of tumbleweed with a flamer. 

Six skittered down the roof at one-third speed and laid down on her stomach to peek over the edge. “My darling, my dear, the love of my life, you know I love you very much and I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth but you are VERY High Up.”

Veronica waved, gave her wives a thumbs up, and continued burning radioactive tumbleweed. 

Angel found that his heart froze as Blondie leaned over the edge of the casino, and didn’t start again even after Raul yelled at him to at least kneel and lean instead of standing nearly on the edge. Falling fifty stories would be a bad death, he felt. He couldn’t imagine either of them getting old, but it was neither a fitting _ nor _ a dignified way to go. 

He had no particular fear of death (if anything, close calls made life more bearable), but he’d been running and gunning for longer than Blondie and the unforgiving laws of statistics meant he’d probably die first. Death meant the sweet embrace of peaceful nothingness, but it also meant no irritatingly tall taciturn men in ridiculous ponchos. 

_ Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat _ , he thought grimly, and suddenly felt very old. 

Christine and Six started arguing at top volume about radioactive ash and wind patterns and if lashing the harness to the roof in four places instead of three would notably improve safety. 

Blondie wandered back to where Angel had sensibly stayed in the stairwell out of the sun. He noted Angel looked a slightly different flavor of grim. Probably because he hadn’t gotten to shoot anyone.

Six high-stepped back with a terrible squelching sound, the tough rubber bottoms of her boots going tacky in the heat. 

“Why are we here?” Angel asked.

“You’re the only ones who show up on time, you get dragged on errands. I don’t make the rules.” 

She cocked her head at Blondie. “Do you want tequila?”

“I’m offended you have to ask.”

“Good, you need to carry it. Let’s go.” 

It was a miniscule trip as far as errands for Six went, across the street to Gomorrah. They did not have to duck between any scantily clad people working the Strip out front. The lobby was freshly painted and upholstered and a little more sedate. More importantly, it looked far cleaner. 

The madam behind the front desk, swathed in velvet, was going over something with a short well-dressed man in beautifully tooled double shoulder holsters. Angel noticed him noticing Blondie.

 “Belladonna, darling!” Six purred, kissing her on both cheeks. “Keeping out of trouble, Tuco?” she asked over the tall woman’s shoulder. 

“I shoot when I have to shoot.” he said modestly. “Weapons, please.”

“We’ll be here all DAY if you make me take  _ everything _ off.” she winked, but left her shotgun on the desk as a token concession and vanished behind the scenes with Belladonna.

Tuco eyed Angel up and down with interest, the gay once-over variant two, where you’re trying to figure out if someone’s taken or not. Angel was suddenly acutely aware that his boots were perhaps not as shiny as they could be and his shirt and pants don’t quite match. 

“You always did like them tall and handsome,” Tuco told Blondie. 

Cutting off Blondie’s irritated sigh, “If you want to go into my casino, you leave your weapons here. Unless you’re here to rob me, which I don’t recommend.” he told Angel.

“Yeah, Tuco,” Blondie said flatly. “This is a stickup. Gimme all your tequila.” He slapped a bag of caps on the counter. 

Tuco sent off an underling and started, in the manner of someone who hasn’t seen an old friend in a while but is valiantly trying to pretend no time at all has passed, “You know, I heard about a job on the Big Circle-”

“Our partnership has long since been untied.”

“But that’s the thing about ropes and partnerships, they’re flexible so you can always retie them later-”

“I’d rather put my head in a noose.”

Tuco grinned, silver glinting off a badly filled tooth. “What a waste of good rope.” 

Angel didn’t like any of these insinuations. Drifted a warning hand closer to his gun. Fired off a blunt question to distract Tuco. “That a threat, friend Omerta?”

Six chose that moment to reappear, Belladonna’s arm around her waist and a bottle of vodka in each fist. “If Tuco had been involved with any of  _ that _ Family’s business, I would have broken him in half like an agave leaf,” she said bright as the sun glinting off a power fist, and Belladonna tsked but kissed the top of her head. 

Tuco spun to keep Six in view, even if that meant turning his back to Angel, and chuckled nervously. “Friends? Blondie and me went to jail together, of course we’re friends!” 

Six looked delighted, Angel and Blondie and Belladonna less so.

“Were you cellmates?” she asked. 

“Yes.” Blondie ground out. 

Six was visibly trying to contain her questions, and settled on “Well! What a lovely meeting of...old friends, but we’ve got work to do. Where’s my goddamn liquor, Tuco?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from the song Vegas Lights by Panic! at the Disco. 
> 
> In-game, House has a bunch of police robots protecting the Strip. You can upgrade them to fight for you at the Dam. The implications of a robotic police force of killer robots are. hmmmm….how do you say...bad? Even Six has realized this and shut them down, but Raquel doesn’t know that. 
> 
> Holorifles are my favorite DLC weapon. The Red Glare shoulder-mounted rocket launcher is also very fun but does not make quite as good a sound.
> 
> The Boomers are an absolutely buckwild faction and make me nervous. There’s a quest to give them a bomber plane to help with the end battle at the Dam and I will never do that bc it seems incredibly likely they would bomb my brand new city next and we can’t fuckin HAVE THAT.
> 
> Cassidy Caravans- to start Cass’ companion quest, you need to convince her to sell her caravan to a company that ends up being Extremely Bad. You cannot get her caravan back for her after that, which is BULLSHIT, OBSIDIAN. 
> 
> General notes on the Lucky 38- the cocktail lounge floor is supposed to rotate according to a promotional sign out front, but doesn’t in-game. This is a house of two mechanics plus Raul there is no way they are not going to fix that immediately. I don’t know how tall the 38 is in-game, I could probably figure it out from doing some math but I don’t want to. The closest real-world counterpart, the Stratosphere, is 1100ish feet tall, and that is Too Tall so I chopped it in half. If Gomorrah is ~10 stories this looks roughly in scale. 
> 
> Radioactive ash- one of the things that got cut from this game was radioactive tumbleweeds that would do damage if they bumped into you and I’m still sad about that.
> 
> Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat- all hours wound, the last one kills. My God do I love sundial mottoes. 
> 
> Six’s boots melting a bit on the roof- THIS HAPPENED TO ME I had to manually adjust a radar array on an internship and my Converse soles left weird footprints across the roof.
> 
> Belladonna Belheumer is a character I created for a non-Fallout DND one-shot, she’s here because I think she would be very good at running a brothel that treated its workers fairly. In-game, you can seriously fuck up the Omerta family who are doing some real fucked up shit and also smuggling weapons, but there’s no clear indication of who takes over or if shit gets better for the workers. but this is a fix-it fic, so there. 
> 
> There will be no guns on lanyards in my fic when shoulder holsters are way sexier and more convenient. A question I ask myself on a weekly basis at this point is “how the FUCK did The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly get made? Why does Tuco have a gun on a lanyard? Is Blondie the “good” because he plays with a kitten for approximately ten seconds?” I will summon Sergio Leone from the dead if I must I have so many questions


	3. the ways and means committee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> let's talk about politics bayBEE and yearn for the rewards of love without submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known

All the untidy activity in the Lucky 38 continued, awful but cheerful. The last time Angel had been in the cocktail lounge, two weeks ago at Six’s wedding, he’d gotten Blondie to laugh at something he wished he could remember now.  It’d been almost three months since the Dam now, and he was still measuring time since the Dam, he realized. 

Six and Veronica and Christine got married right on the information desk in the Hoover Dam Visitor’s Center while Six was bleeding out, afraid she wasn’t going to make it. She refused to play the hand death dealt again, shuffling and stacking and gambling on sheer willpower to get herself home that night in a stolen NCR jeep. Their marriage after she’d properly kicked the NCR out was a party half celebrating being alive and half incredibly public display of affection.

Blondie remembered very little of the wedding party proper, except waking up on the game room couch on Angel’s shoulder sometime before dawn. Angel had been wearing a party hat, and Blondie had wished for a camera before he left. 

“All right, I made an agenda like you wanted, gang’s all here! My head is going to explode from all the FUCKING things we need to talk about.” Six threw a notepad at Arcade that said  _ BOOMERS??? POLICE? FREESIDE? BOONE????? _ and the beginnings of a small-caliber ammunition inventory in her terrible scrawl and almost tripped over Rex. 

Arcade pointed out in very many words that alcohol certainly wouldn’t help her headaches, and Six didn’t break eye contact as she poured herself a shot. She slammed it down, flipped the glass end over end, and let it land on the bartop upside down. 

He suddenly looked very tired and handed Six a tiny glass in order to have both hands free, and poured her something out of a reused sarsaparilla bottle. 

“What is this thing you are handing me?” suspiciously holding it up to the light. 

“It’s a flavor enhanced nutrient water beverage, tee em arr copyright.”

Six knocked it back like a shot.

“Well, for maximum absorption you’d sip it slowly over the course of more than two seconds.”

“Then why’d you put it in a shot glass?”

“A forty mililiter beaker is not a shot glass.”

“Every vessel is a shot glass with the proper application of determination.” She made a face. “Why’s it feel like slime in the back of my mouth?”

“Are you sure it’s not whatever pre-War liquor you just drank? Might be too much in this batch maybe,” he muttered, scribbling something down. “How do you feel about the taste overall?” 

“No, no, the vodka burned properly going down. The thing you just gave me didn’t really taste like anything. Not even water, which is weird. Hey, what’s in this?” 

“Healthy stuff.”

“Can you be more specific?” and lost interest as Arcade launched into an elaborate chemical breakdown. Once she’d wandered off to find a jar of cherries, Arcade whispered to Veronica “It’s just aloe vera juice. I don’t think she’ll go for it as a long term dehydration solution.”

“Yeah, because that stuff is gross. But thank you.” Veronica whispered back. 

* * *

Everyone ((n.), people Six liked  _ and  _ trusted  _ and _ had a direct investment in New Vegas’ continued well-being) settled in a loose scrum of chairs and loveseats. Raul had peeled back one of the shutter panels so they could look down at the city spread under their feet. 

Angel and Blondie took separate armchairs on Six’s left, a table between them, sun at their backs and facing the door.  Since the Legion safehouse job, something had shifted and changed, a mutual unspoken agreement to keep a professional distance. 

It was lonely and Blondie was bored. Three weeks since their last job, two weeks since he’d seen Angel at Six’s wedding- he’d done a solo job or two around Freeside to keep his hand in, but it wasn’t the same. Maneuvering two pimps into killing each other was barely worth mentioning. What did people even do with peace and quiet?

He snuck a look at Angel, mostly in shadow. A man could cut his hand on the light catching that high cheekbone. 

“ _ Look  _ at my city! Pretty as a diamond flush.” Six yelled from behind the bar, gazing out at the sunset. In a lesser woman, this possessiveness could be seen as insecure and grasping. With Six, it merely looked like she was finally back in her proper place in the world, after a brief year’s detour. 

She flung herself down on the nearest sleek loveseat in a puff of dust, one leg over one boxy arm and the other tucked under herself. Sighing, she unhappily wriggled back until she could pillow her head on Christine’s crossed thighs. The loveseat squealed unhappily when Veronica sat on the other arm, one leg on the floor and the other jammed between Christine and the side of the loveseat. 

“Most recent incident first. How do we-” and Six thoughtfully punctuated her sentence by sipping through a novelty straw shaped like a cowboy hat- “fix the Boomer thing?”

“We?” Angel lowered his tequila in alarm, setting it down on the tiny pedestal table between his and Blondie’s armchairs. 

“See, I thought you might like to help, seeing as someone _fired on the city where you live_ , but if you don’t WANT a job I’m sure Blondie is capable of helping me on his own-”

Cass interrupted, curled up in an armchair off to Six’s right and out of her line of view with a whiskey. “I think it’s mostly fixed. It’s not my fuckin fault they’re so impatient- Crimson stole almost all the pack brahmins when they cleared out and I’ve been stretched godfuckingdamn thin as it is just getting food into the city, but I’ll get it done tomorrow.” 

“But the new herd is coming in from the north?” 

“If that rancher stiffed me I’ll skin her alive.”

“Okay, grab her last payment before you leave. I threatened Raquel with the Securitrons, but  _ should  _ we reactivate them?” She didn't make eye contact with anyone, staring up at the blistering paint on the ceiling. 

Arcade, from across the bench they were using as a drinks table, said “If we  _ didn’t _ use the fascist police robots a robber baron built to oppress the city, I for one would appreciate it. Although it would be nice to keep the mercenaries in check. With threats. Not actual violence.”

“Well, what are me and Boone and Blondie and Angel then? We’re certainly not police, but we’re not exactly mercenaries.” 

Angel, in the middle of a sip of whiskey, made a dismissive little hand motion. Blondie had an uncomfortable flashback to an early job, pitting two gangs against each other and killing off half San Miguel in the process.

“Can’t bribe a robot.” Boone said.

“You can buy anything and anyone in this city.” Cass countered. 

Veronica, a little startled Boone spoke, added “Securitrons don’t have human brains. Prone to mistakes. BUT, it turns out, when you get rid of the giant robots- the giant robots that don’t have a particular mission to keep the peace with the least amount of life lost possible? People get a lot rowdier in the power vacuum.”  

“Do we really need police?” asked Raul. 

Blondie, who lived well out of the way of the Securitrons’ old patrol paths around the Strip’s walls, stopped listening. Rules don’t apply to bounty killers anyway. 

Something wasn’t right between him and Angel. Had he been too forward the night they’d returned from the Legion safehouse job? He had thought his enthusiasm was returned, but then nothing ended up happening. Was it because he was ex-Legion? Was Angel was just waiting for a good time to vanish into the night or put him down cleanly? How would he even ask Angel this without looking like he was desperately throwing himself at Angel, the first person he’d worked with for longer than a month? 

Angel, who did live in New Vegas proper, was paying attention in order to figure out if he needed to move out of New Vegas again. Unfortunate, because the Vault 21 hotel suited his needs. It was spare and sterile and a little clammy, but familiar. Picking everything up again and creating new routines and new dead drops of supplies would be tiring, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t done this dozens of times before. He didn’t  _ want _ to move, he realized. He was getting  _ attached.  _ Not only to his room, but this city and this particular partnership.  And Blondie was here beside him, and alcohol was here to help ease Blondie being here beside him, and this chair was comfortable, so he might as well stay. 

Six rubbed her forehead, creating a wild temporary landscape of scars and wrinkles. The last bit of the sunset caught her, throwing one scarred temple into ugly relief and leaving the other a dark pit. 

The table lamps all obligingly clicked on.

“Okay. What do I really care about? Keeping people safe. Screening for weapons before going into casinos doesn’t really do a damn. I can’t make all of New Vegas a weapon-free zone or people will riot, and it’d be a bloodbath if a Deathclaw ever got in again.”

Everyone immediately had an opinion. 

Arcade was the loudest. “PERHAPS, ask the city what they want?” 

Six turned on her side. “How would we even do that? This goes with the whole thing we decided to deal with later the other day, the thing about the neighborhoods picking representatives.” 

“I think no guns in casinos and bars is still a good rule.” Veronica told the side of Six’s head. 

“As long as there are still bounties to bring in.” Blondie observed dryly. 

“Well, I don’t want to take ALL the fun out of the Mojave, but you CAN go other places for bounties, if New Vegas suddenly turns tame and domesticated and the desert and hell freeze over.” She twisted into a shape that hurt Blondie’s spine to watch. “You both are always welcome here. Pick a guest room, we’ll make a robot keep it ready. Do I not pay you enough? I like to think I take care of my people.”

“It’s pocket money.” Angel observed, an understatement that had Blondie huffing something that could have been a laugh. 

Blondie rarely wanted for anything- Six paid them well- but he rarely  _ wanted _ for anything.  They were well-compensated specialists- before and after the Dam they’d been too busy and well paid to even think about other jobs. It’d been a lot of running and gunning and clearing out the really bad gangs of rapists and cannibals and the Fiends. One regrettable incident diving into a Vault. A busy life, but one that revolved around the barrel of a gun. No one really had his back- if Six was assassinated tonight, Veronica and Christine would level a casino if it helped them get revenge. If he, Blondie, died tonight, Angel would simply move on and keep working. Find another dumb young pistolero with stars in his eyes.    

Angel, on an entirely different train of thought, realized Six liked taking care of things and felt very clever for figuring this out. She wasn’t openly soft except for her wives, but she tended the Mojave like it was a garden and killing people was a sort of weeding.

Christine had an additional concern. “Back to the Boomers- have you thought about what would happen if an angry brunette with a shoulder mounted missile launcher hit the suite floor  _ where I sleep _ ? Because I have. There’s too much ammo here, and it would definitely compromise the reactor, and New Vegas would be a smoldering crater.”

Angel thought about what the Lucky 38 would look like on fire, and remembered the smell of an oil rig burning, all Old World petroleum and rubber, and the sour-salt taste of the great glowing sea.

When two people know each other very well, they can converse with their eyebrows. Blondie’s creased brow was asking if Angel was all right. Angel thought Blondie’s creased brow meant disapproval of the emotion that must surely be on his face. Angel didn’t meet Blondie’s eyes and turned away, frowning. Blondie thought that meant “please leave me alone, I am fine and continuing to be my regular prickly self” and started paying attention to what Christine was on about. 

“-we have perfectly allocated our ammo on the top and bottom floors of this building to take it down in the messiest way possible. Depending on how we fell, we could take out two out of the three other casinos.”

Six looked nauseous and got up for more ice. “Where are we supposed to put it all? A warehouse? 

“Keep trading it off for goods and services?” suggested Arcade, a bit snidely. 

“That’s not helping the make-the-city-safer part of this meeting.” 

“Build a giant statue.  _ Ad maiorem Six gloriam. _ ” 

Angel barely stifled a huff of amusement. 

“I don’t know what that means, but I know you’re giving me shit.” she scowled, elbow-deep in a cooler.

“Something that cements your new importance, any sort of giant commemorative-”

She went over the bar instead of around, snarling “ Who killed the world? Not women, that’s for  _ fucking sure _ . Old scared men with weapons they used to measure their dicks. It is  _ genuinely impossible  _ for me to do worse than they did. I’m trying to work with the blasted rubble they left and make life a tiny bit less miserable for my fellow citizens. Maybe I  _ do  _ like having a lifetime supply of ammunition nearby, considering what’s happened here.” 

“Thank you for staying calm and reasonable, boss.” Raul said. 

Six squinted at him.  “That sounded sarcastic.” 

“You know what, boss, that’s my fault. For using sarcasm.” 

She rubbed her temples again, this time more aggressively. “Okay. Okay. Moving on. How do I make Freeside not a flammable slum? How many people even live here?” 

Angel, who didn’t live in Freeside, immediately lost interest.

Blondie, who did live in Freeside above the Atomic Wrangler, shifted forward in interest.

Everyone looked at Arcade, as the longest term resident of the city. “I don’t know, actually. New Vegas proper, maybe ten thousand permanent residents? Freeside and Westside are more than twice that, plus whoever lives in the Underside. The Followers see a few hundred people a day.”

Six rustled around behind the bar, knocking the cap of a Nuka-Cola off against the edge of the sink. “We’re not there yet, but we’re going to have a food problem in a few months. The NCR used to trade us food for power, and I think we can still do that, but we don’t have the infrastructure to send power up to the Outpost. I also couldn’t get them to give up the Outpost, but they are finally out of McCarran and the solar farm. And Primm. So those fires are out. But Primm’s a whole different problem.” 

Cook-Cook, a flammable man from a flammable town. This was where it all started, Angel thought with the rush of satisfaction from finally untangling a very tangled string.  She just slammed into the raider’s camp and killed him with his own flamethrower while Angel watched in disbelief from two ridges over. He’d had a complex plan to infiltrate and kill him in his sleep and then take out the rest of the gang and collect nearly thirty thousand caps in bounties with a carefully chosen support team. He was nearly done with stage one and his mole been accepted into the gang, but was killed by Six in her headlong assault. He hadn't known who she was or why she was on a one-woman rampage across the desert, but he'd gained a grudging, fearful sort of respect.  He’d worked with more people than he could genuinely remember over the years, out of necessity or convenience on big jobs. He couldn’t remember a single meaningful thing about any one of them besides Blondie. He found himself once again admiring Blondie’s jawline out of the corner of his eye, and jolted back to attention when Six shouted.

 “THE POINT IS so’s I don’t become another House,” in House’s casino, behind House’s exclusive bar, gesturing out toward House’s city. House’s big gold signet ring on her finger caught the light just so. “I don’t want to be in charge of anything. I just live here and want it to keep staying safe to live here. I want this city to rule itself. I want this desert to rule itself,” she amended, walking back with three rum and Nuka-Colas. 

“Right after I woke up, they pointed me at some geckos and asked me to kill them. After they saw how good I was at that, they pointed me at some men. This whole new life has been about killing the right people and it’s  _ exhausting _ .” Dwarfed by the high-back loveseat, she looked very small and tired .

“Killing people or figuring out the right people to kill?” Arcade asked. 

Six tsked and flicked her hand dismissively. “Not the point.” 

“Look at this opportunity!” Christine said, eyes afire. “A walled city, with enough money and power and just enough resources to really establish itself. Kids could grow up safe here. People could start making serious art and science without thinking about commercialism or war.”  

“Isn’t everything miserable and difficult enough without throwing politicians and police and generals into the mix?” Boone asked, still nursing a whiskey. 

“I’d rather continue to be a diplomat. Don’t you have a report to deliver?”

Boone stayed stoic behind his sunglasses, still on even indoors at night, as everyone turned to look at him.

“Dogtown is alive.” and having delivered that grenade of a message, shifted uncomfortably. 

Many people started talking at once. 

Six and Angel and Blondie all said "WHAT" at once in varying tones. 

"North...eastish?"

"How'd they SURVIVE?"

"They were big, I guess it's reasonable something survived-"

"They must have had a dozen nukes hit during the war-" 

R aul grumbled “Denver, not Dogtown.”

“That’s what they call themselves. Went up to Salt Lake on a caravan job. The Dogtowners were looking for Old World science, trading greens. Came in on a big floating thing,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

Six was leaning at an acute angle over the coffee table. “What kind of science?” 

Boone leaned back and away from Six. “Chemistry?” 

Arcade and Six looked at each other, puzzled. “Vegetables and chemistry? Hydroponics? Growing plants in water,” he added.

Veronica started having many ideas at once. “You can do that?”

Raul cleared his throat. “Not really efficient here, before the War. You need a lot of water and power and the right things to put in the water.”

Christine looked triumphant. “We HAVE lots of water and power!” 

“They wanted to meet you.” Boone told Six.

Six crashed against the back of the loveseat, and it squealed in distress. “You couldn’t have led with that? When? Where?”

“They said they’ll be at Salt Lake every ten days. I said I’d tell you and you’d send a message back on a caravan.”

Six slouched down further, thinking. 

“I don’t know you’re the best person to send.” Veronica said.

“We’ve been married for less than a month. I’m invoking a Family Meeting.” Christine said. 

Six flopped back into Christine’s lap, batting her eyes, the very picture of innocence. “They asked for me specifically! I’m  _ very very good _ at being a diplomat!  In my extensive diplomatic experience, getting things done is generally a matter of shooting the right people and getting the right people the right things,” 

Blondie, who had never heard of a mobster but was familiar with the concept, felt his skin prickle.

Veronica asked “Is that what we’re calling diplomatic experience now?” 

Christine tried to scowl down, but a tiny smile snuck through. “Family. Meeting. Tomorrow” 

* * *

Figuring out how to open formal diplomatic negotiations with a city everyone thought was dead involved a lot of high-level minutiae, a lot of planning, and mostly didn’t involve Angel and Blondie.

 It was well past last call, the sky was starting to pink, and everyone had gotten a little punchy and moved onto the last few bottles of whiskey. The vast stores of the Lucky 38 were not inexhaustible, and had been sorely strained by the wedding, and four crates of assorted liquor from Gomorrah were merely a temporary bandage. 

Six, through a mouthful of the last of the ice chips, protested “Me? I’ve never done nothing to nobody.” Butter wouldn’t melt in Six’s mouth, much less the ice from her rum and Nuka, which is why she was gleefully crunching it. 

Veronica yelled from behind the bar, eating cherries right out of the jar, “NOT EVEN ONCE.”

“Not. Even. Once.” 

“Never done nobody not a harm nor a hurt.” chimed in Christine. 

“Neither fish nor fowl have got the foggiest why you’ve got foes who think you’re not faultless,” sing-songed Veronica. 

“You’ve got me there? I think?” echoing a bit as she tried to get the very last ice chip out of the glass without actually reaching inside. 

Arcade, who had trying to recall something else this entire time, said “Wait, that- that testimony doesn’t count. You can’t oblige spouses to testify against spouses.” 

“That’s a NCR rule. We wouldn’t be married in NCR territory.” objected Christine, stealing cherries from Veronica. 

“That seems like a good rule to steal, though. Not the marrying one. Write it down, Arcade.”

“It IS written down, that’s the POINT of law books-” 

Angel watched this terribly domestic scene, all three tangled up on the loveseat, and felt something he couldn’t identify, a hollow ache somewhere in his chest. It was too low for a heart attack,he thought, probably. It was probably time to find a discreet doctor. 

Blondie watched this same scene, all three talking over each other in one smooth marital machine. That looked like... it didn’t hurt. That looked...nice. He wanted someone to sit next to him on a too-small loveseat. Or at least a friendlier coworker. When you’d been working for this long with one person it was normal to feel some sort of positive emotion toward them, surely? He wasn’t sure whether the fault lay with Angel for being a hard man in a hard desert or himself for becoming too attached, and went back to worrying at one facet on the bottom of his glass. 

Veronica was still rattling around under the bar, and popped up to say “There’s more whiskey by the other bar well. I need someone tall.” Blondie rolled up and out of his chair in one smooth motion. 

Angel, watching him go, missed Six nudging Christine, who jolted up. “I also need someone tall. Angel, if you would?” Angel tore his gaze away and gave her a dour nod.

Six put her feet up longways on the loveseat and wriggled back into the cushions a bit, very pleased with herself as she stole the last of Christine’s drink.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did the Dickensian thing of putting everyone around a table and letting them talk and reveal more about themselves than they wanted to, but the sad cowboys preferred to be sad and not pay attention.
> 
> “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.” Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Bight”.
> 
> A party hat is a real equippable piece of headgear in Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3. It provides 1 damage resistance, because it’s so festive. 
> 
> “Shuffle and stack, a gamble that paid off”- from one of the Forecaster’s predictions. This is a good game sometimes actually. https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/The_Forecaster 
> 
> Arcade is correct, there are 37- 44 milliliters in a shot glass, not 40. 
> 
> Talk to your doctor before drinking a fuckton of aloe vera juice over a long period of time. 
> 
> Eero Saarinen designed the famous mid-century tulip table in order to “clear up the slum of legs in the American home”, a phrase that has stuck in my brain since I heard it when I was twelve. House was apparently not partial to this style of midcentury table, because there is an absolute slum of table and chair legs everywhere you look in the 38. There are zero tulip tables in the 38, I lied, this is the one thing in this whole fic that’s not canon. 
> 
> Blondie is having a flashback to the events of A Fistful of Dollars. 
> 
> You can read all about the Legion safehouse job in the previous installment in this series. 
> 
> Every character I ever write will fling themselves down at some point. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/10/16/a-complete-guide-to-flinging-in-oscar-wilde/
> 
> Oil rig burning- Angel was there during the events of Fallout 2, where you blow up the Enclave’s secret oil rig base. He’s not very much older than Blondie, but looks worse because he fell into the irradiated ocean. 
> 
> There’s a nuclear reactor inside the casino. It’s dormant/offline for most of the game, unless you complete a specific quest. 
> 
> “Ad maiorem Six gloriam?”- to the greater glory of Six?
> 
> "Who killed the world?" is from Mad Max: Fury Road. 
> 
> There is a dumb giant NCR statue near the NCR Mojave Outpost. A lot of people make fun of it. 
> 
> Raul's sarcasm line is directly lifted from the game.
> 
> New Vegas population- this is a wild guess. it’s fucking DUMB that New Vegas in-game is so empty. You get so hyped for this big glittering last surviving Old World city and you get there and the city proper is like two square blocks with a few dozen people wandering around. Freeside is a little bit bigger with like fifty NPCs. Las Vegas is so large and sprawling i REFUSE to believe there are so few people surviving- with tensions rising between the NCR and Legion during the game proper people should have been FLOCKING to the city for safety.
> 
> Cook-Cook is an extremely bad man you can kill for a bounty in-game. Angel had been trying to recreate the events of For A Few Dollars More without Blondie, so he wouldn't have succeeded anyway. 
> 
> Diplomatic talk- a self-assigned title. The best build for a Fallout game in general is a gunslinging diplomat. That’s pretty close to Six with her ten charisma, except she’s more of a shotgun surgeon. 
> 
> Denver was supposed to show up in a cancelled Fallout game, overrun by feral pets, hence Dogtown. 
> 
> The NCR is not very friendly toward marriage equality or being queer in general. The queer characters in-game have some opinions about this, which is more than I expected from a 2010 AAA video game.


	4. feelingstalk quaratinezone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in this installment, the boys each pick a wife and go hey…..I see u have a healthy and stable relationship ...how'd u do that (asking for a friend)

Six watched her wives and her favorite employees head to opposite sides of the bar with a nightstalker grin. 

“That seemed...obvious.” Cass said.

Six shed her smile and sighed. “This is AWFUL. Being around both of them like this is AWFUL. They’re going to kill me by irritating me to death. "

“One of them is going to get shot because they’re distracted by the other’s ass.” 

“It’s just good business! And employee safety!” Six agreed. 

* * *

Blondie, waiting for Veronica to hop up on the inner bartop, waited for Angel to offer him a light before he realized Angel wasn’t there and he had to light his cigar himself. 

“Whoa- okay, that was close, everything’s coming up Veronica,” and immediately knocked over a half-full bottle of whiskey. 

Jumping down in order to avoid tracking whiskey all over the bar, she told him “Hop up on the outer bar.” 

Blondie squinted at her in disbelief.

“Six won’t let me put a chair on top of the bar- I told you I needed someone tall.” 

Blondie heaved out a cloud of smoke and clambered up. 

“There we go! I think it’s that light-” and she pointed to the closest one- “it’ll make a clicky sort of sound in a minute, and then you pull down on it.”

Blondie looked doubtful.

“This is why the Old World was so fucked up- being a billionaire rots your brain. It’s part of opening a safe.”

“In the ceiling?”

“Behind a picture frame- other side of the bar.”

They waited for Christine and Angel to do something on the other side of the bar.

“How are...you three?”

She gave him an odd look over her shoulder, trying to wipe as much whiskey as possible into the sink. “We’re well, thank you? How are you and Angel?”

“Me and Angel?” he tried to say as neutrally as possible. 

“Yes, yes, congratulations, you’ve got a boy you think is hot.”

Blondie continued frowning at her. 

“That’s right, can’t trust me around leggy brunettes.” she said, and managed to stay poker faced for a full second before grinning up at him, rinsing off her scarred knuckles. Somehow, the melee wife was the least banged up of the three of them.  

He offered her a cigar in the distinct lack of anything else to do. 

“You’re not getting out of this by offering me your terrible cigars. I might actually catch fire if I smoke right now, “ she said thoughtfully, looking down at her soaked bandanna before dropping it in the bar well.

Blondie politely stepped back.

“No, come back- you havin’ boy problems, son?” and she heaved up onto the bar top, crossed her legs, and stared at him expectantly.

“I haven’t  _ got  _ anyone right now. How’d you get Six and Christine?” he asked, a little acerbic.

Veronica gazed off at her wife, eyes soft and fond. “Well, Christine was my childhood sweetheart, you know how it is, and then Six is Six. Hard  _ not  _ to fall in love with her. I had to leave...where I was before, and she offered me Vegas, and I didn't have a lot of other options to choose from.”

“Would another question be indiscreet?”

“Depends on the question.” 

Bolstered by a truly alarming amount of tequila, he asked “How did you know?”

“Six just straight up told me the day after we met. Christine doesn’t say in words. Like, doing the boring maintenance on the housekeeping robots, or finding me a box of Fancy Lad Snack Cakes, or-”

The pendant lamp made a sharp click and they looked up, startled. Blondie pulled it down by the lampshade until it clicked again. 

Veronica  almost patted his shoulder, but thought better of it and  bounced down from the bartop. “Congratulations, you’re done, thank you for being tall.”

* * *

On the other side of the bar, Christine levered herself up to sit on the bar and take off her boots one-handed, still holding a drink.

“So, how does it....work...between you three?” Angel asked, vaguely tracing out a long triangle with the stem of his pipe between Christine and Six and the invisible Veronica.

Christine put her glass down hard on the bartop, gin sloshing over the side a bit. “Mr Eyes, are you asking me who tops? No, no, of course, Mr Eyes was your father,” she said, cutting off his protestations. 

“Managing  _ two  _ of them.”

“Oh.” One boot on, one boot off, Christine looked back at her wife. “Like any other relationship, I guess? More talking. Way more talking.” 

Angel hrrmed behind his pipe, waiting for Blondie to give him a light and then fumbling for his own matches in irritation. 

“Occasionally, Mr Eyes, talking will save you some grief.” She kicked off a boot in the vague direction of the other one, heaved up and walked down the inner bartop to a framed newspaper front page about the Lucky 38’s opening. 

Angel followed, and didn’t scoff out of politeness. 

“I like things with a minimum of fuss.”

“I agree.” she said, and kicked a cash register out of her way. He knew the least about this wife, only that her facial scars were in a lot of the same places as Six’s, but jagged where Six’s neatly cut over Benny’s scars on each temple. Both of them had a collar of scars, like they’d nearly clawed through their own throats trying to get something off.  She’d been emaciated and twitchy and completely out of it when Six reappeared in New Vegas with her in a fireman’s carry, and she still wasn’t entirely at ease in her own skin. 

Christine handed him two bottles of very dusty absinthe, and asked “If you like things going smoothly, Six is not the employer for you.” 

He shrugged one shoulder while deciding where to put them. “Money’s good. Partner’s fine.” 

Christine made an encouraging sound and handed him two more bottles.  “Yes, you’ve got a hot boy.”

“He’s not my hot boy.”

“I don’t see him with anyone else.” 

Angel thought about Tuco and frowned. 

Christine said "Love makes people do strange things. Won't argue that. It can drive you crazy sometimes if you can't... connect."

“Love would be the death of me.” He was running out of space in the bar well for bottles of absinthe.

“Well, that’s dramatic. Isn’t it the death of everybody? Love of something, anyway.” 

“I have few problems you or Six can solve, Christine.”

“Oh no no no no noooooo. You’re responsible for your own problems and yours stands about six foot four.” She wasn’t looking at him, feeling around the edge of the frame until he heard a sharp click. 

"If you love each other, and you’re together, that’s all that matters.” she said with the confidence of a newlywed. 

They heard another sharp click and she got her nails under the frame until it swung outwards. Angel couldn’t quite see inside, but Christine picked up something very heavy very carefully, and presented him with a gold bar.

He looked up in disbelief.

“Please take this, it is _ extremely heavy. _ You can’t keep it. It’s for Cass’ pack brahmin.” and stepped off the edge of the bar with a heavy thud, landing on her feet. 

* * *

“That took a minute,” Six remarked. 

“Angel wanted to know who tops.” 

“Bold of you to think I’ve ever let anyone top me.” She leaned forward, making a frightening amount of eye contact.

Christine tried to hide a smug grin behind a glass. Veronica stared determinedly off into the middle distance. 

Six said “All right, everybody out, go to bed, show’s over.” She frowned at Angel and Blondie. “Except you two. I need to talk to you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Six u fuckin busybody  
> A lot of Veronica and Christine’s lines are from the game, notably “Love makes people do strange things…” Dead Money is a GOOD DLC with KILLER WRITING and it’s also where the gold bar comes from, you can break into a pre-War hotel safe and steal Many gold bars. and also kill a shitty dude, which are the things I love most in life: crime and getting one over on shitty dudes


	5. sword delivery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there's some homophobia in this chapter but the shitty person immediately gets the tar beaten out of him.  
> okay look. LOOK. there are at least two chapters that go between this one and the first one but this one was fun to write and is more importantly done and i need the dopamine of a finished chapter.

“There are few times in my life I find myself in need of men. I need two very tall, dour men known for their close quarters combat speed to stand behind me and look very cranky while I deal with the NCR. We’re going to Primm tomorrow morning. Well, not the in-six-hours tomorrow morning, the one after that.”

“We are?” 

“We are! Oh, ARE you doing things?”

“No, but-”

“Perfect! Be ready for the five AM train, dress nice, we’ll be back by midnight, no overnight stay, non-hazard pay.”

They took the last train of the night, walking down to the east cistern from the North Freeside gates. Jammed into the main engine behind the sweaty techs swapping out ranks of batteries, she knew everyone’s names and their kids’ and dogs’ names by the time they got out of South Vegas. She listened to their opinions on the next new rail line to be built after reconnecting the Boulder City branch down to Novac, and if they could take the NCR’S main rail yard to protect the engines from sandstorms.  She got deep into an argument about the viability of electric rails as opposed to batteries that had to be constantly recharged at HELIOS, and sweet talked them into rattling past the quarry all the way down to an emergency railyard behind Primm.

Jumping down from the train in the full heat of the morning, Six whipped her duster off. “Don’t know why they wanted to meet at _noon_. What a clusterfuck of incompetent idiots,” she sighed, rifling through her bag. 

“Okay! Got the sword, got my boys. Couldn’t brief you on the train, but you still don’t have to do much- just look pretty but scary. NCR wants to cut a new dedicated trade route with perks for merchants up through Sloan, now that it’s safer. I don’t have a problem with shorter trade routes, but they’re leaning on Primm to only buy from NCR merchants and give them deals at the hotels or lose their trade completely, and that. Just. Won’t. Do.” she said, aggressively pinning a flyaway back into her crown braid. 

She set out on a fast jog trot down the rails, forcing them to step lively to keep up. She charged straight over the pass behind Primm to a small grave on a bluff marked DANIEL WYAND- COURIER FOUR, and ceremoniously poured out a bottle of Cass’ finest moonshine. 

Blondie had never seen her face so flat and expressionless, her eyes so empty. She didn’t look gutted, but empty, in the way an empty gun looks all laid out in pieces on a table. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her openly mourn anything. He didn’t know much about a Courier’s life and had never asked how much Six remembered of it, but it seemed like a life Six would have been very, very good at. Her protecting the Mojave was like using a Gatling gun where a carbine would do.

In Angel’s estimation, a quiet Six was an even more dangerous Six. She was fierce and bright and relentless as the sun, crackling with her second-chance life. She was rarely hunched over herself like this, and as the seconds ticked by he got more anxious to hear her crack an irreverent joke, shake off the desert hush of this awful little cemetery, say anything. He valued his blood staying inside his body where it belonged, but felt that the proper thing to do for anyone else would be a gruff clap on the shoulder, perhaps?  

She straightened with a sigh to Angel’s great relief. “He was my friend. I think? I hope he would have liked it.” 

She stayed quiet until they were in Primm proper. “The new owner’s an old friend- I think I can count on her, but I haven’t seen her in a long time.” she told them, and ducked low under the roller coaster behind the Bison Steve Hotel (Under New Management!). This forced Blondie and Angel, head and shoulders above her, to detour onto the sidewalk as the Pre-War city planners intended. She didn’t quite knock her hat all the way off, but it was a near thing.  

“Layla, darling!” she sang out to the young lady behind the counter. 

The young lady behind the counter gasped and dropped her magazine. Instead of reaching out for a hug or to touch Six’s face like she wanted to, she settled for saying “You’re looking very well.”

Six, resplendent in a pinstriped suit and still holding a long khaki duster, did something between a bow and a curtsy, sweeping her hat off. “Thank you, I try. Layla, my ...employees? Associates? Friends? Friends. Mr Blondie, Mr Angel.” 

Layla finally noticed them. “Gentlemen! Welcome to the Bison Steve- Six and I go way back! She broke my nose when we met!” she said with delight, presenting a very bumpy profile against the dingy wall. 

Something in Six’s eyes changed- not quite guilt, but not quite ease. “That I did. I have a package for you.”

“Ooooh, back to your old job just for me? I feel very special,” and Layla framed her cleavage nicely by leaning very far over the wide counter and bestowing a magnificent smile.

“Let’s talk.”

They ducked into some sort of office, and there was sudden and copious weeping from behind the door. 

Blondie and Angel exchanged a very tired look. Six had been married for less than a month, but they’d already run into literal dozens of people trying to move on from their crush on her in varyingly constructive ways. She’d broken the city’s heart, and Veronica and Christine tried not to be openly smug about that.

Six popped back out, slightly damper. “Nobody will recognize you- they’re all career office people and pencil pushers.” 

“I wasn’t going to agree to them anyway but Six! My mother’s sword! All the way from Dayglow!”

Six kissed her forehead, suddenly motherly. “Least I can do after I broke your nose. Think of it as a gift for your new life.” 

 Layla tried to wipe her eyes in between hiccups. “The best meeting room is over in Vikki and Vance’s, they finally shored up their back wall and my dining room still looks like a grenade went off.” 

Six shifted uncomfortably, said her goodbyes, and practically dragged them out onto the street while Layla locked her mother’s sword in the hotel safe. 

“Did you and her…?” asked Blondie.

“Did me and her what? Did I know her...Before?” 

“Did you know her ...biblically?” Angel managed to say with a straight face. 

“I don’t kiss and tell! I’d be bragging for a while anyway, you know what they say about Couriers.” and immediately snaps back to the Six they know, all sharp wit cut with terrible jokes. 

Vikki & Vance’s Casino is in a little better repair than Bison Steve’s, but with the same number of bloodstains on the carpet. The back room did indeed have a new back wall. 

When the NCR was half an hour late, Layla left to go take care of hotel business.

“You broke her nose?” asked Angel. 

Six, pacing around the table, stretched to buy time to think. “She tried to rob me. Can’t really blame her, I must have looked easy pickings and deserters don’t get back pay. I am glad she’s found something stable with her old crew- they’re trying to fix that dump up.” Defensive, she added “I did not notice a significant difference before _or_ after I threw a grenade in the dining room to clear out a nest of Powder Gangers.”

She flickered between the head and the foot of the table, the armchairs, sitting on top of the coffee table, finally arranged herself between Blondie and Angel on an ancient chrome and leather couch, and settled down with a drink to wait. 

She fell asleep on Angel’s shoulder an hour in. 

* * *

 

The New California Republic diplomat and her four babyfaced soldiers were five hours late with no explanation. She was a pale, badly sunburnt woman with a limp in a rumpled suit and a poorly waxed overcoat so new it hadn’t quite cured all the way. Dropping it on a chair with a gummy thud, she fidgeted with her lapels and failed to discreetly size up Six.

The three were in various states of dishabille. Six had abandoned her duster and suit jacket and hat four and three-quarters of an hour ago, and had undone one shirt button too many. Blondie was also down to shirtsleeves. Angel’s only concession to the heat was to remove his hat and loosen his string tie. 

Six was currently lounging with her feet up on the coffee table. “Oh! You’re a new one. Courier Six.” and held out her hand, very pointedly not getting up.

“Ambassador Esda.” she said with a tight smile, and reluctantly came over to shake Six’s hand. 

“A drink, Ambassador Esda?”

“Oh. Goodness no. I never drink on the job.” she said with a glance of distaste at the glasses littering the coffee table.

“Too hot in the Mojave today to turn down a cold drink, Ambassador.” 

“Almost makes me wish for a nuclear winter.” she said, and very pointedly walked back to sit down at the head of the conference room table.

The soldiers were very clearly longing for a drink, watching Angel sip some mediocre tequila and Blondie whiteknuckle the bottle. 

“To business, then.” She cleared her throat and her eyes went slightly unfocused, reading off a script in her head.  “I am Ambassador Bethany Esda of the New California Republic and all her territories, authorized by the fifth President of those territories, Aaron Kimball, to broker a trade deal with...Courier Six, of….Vegas. You are _all_ authorized to negotiate?”

Six raised her glass in acknowledgement. “I _am_ authorized to act on the best interests of the sovereign City of New Vegas and the Mojave.”

“And whose authority do you represent?”

“Mine.” 

Ambassador Esda looked nervous. “Do you really need your retinue here?” 

“Only if you do.” Six finally leaned forward with a smirk, tasting blood.

Layla rushed in as the very anxious, very young soldiers filed onto the casino floor, and Blondie and Angel stalked after. 

A slight, graying man with startling green eyes and a sheriff’s badge poured a rawboned deputy a drink. “Can’t wait for things to get back to normal around here- now boys, be good, or I’ll shoot you dead.” he warned the NCR contingent, and noticed the out of place gunslingers. “Blondie, that goes for you too.” 

He gave Blondie the gay once-over with a little grin, variant three, the kind when an old flame has unexpectedly gotten hotter since you saw them last. 

“Sheriff Meyers.” Blondie smiled back before he could help himself, and was experiencing the brief shock of coming across a one night stand you never expected to see again in a very formal setting. Like your new doctor’s office, or a wedding, or delicate diplomatic proceedings.

Angel was experiencing the brief ugly shock of realizing your partner has a past and a body that didn’t involve you until you were thrown together by the whims of fate. 

* * *

Meanwhile, a cordial and considered diplomatic negotiation was taking place in the conference room. 

Six was on her feet, and her glare could have powered New Vegas for the entire day. “Oh, like you helped Primm when the hotel was overrun with escapees from your poorly managed prison complex? Like you helped Goodsprings when they were attacked by the same escapees? Perhaps like you helped everyone who lived in Nipton, down to the last citizen?” 

“Oh, and you helped all those towns personally?” she sneered.

Six’s smile was less a smile and more a warning flash of all her teeth. “I did.”

“She did.” confirmed Layla from behind the safety of the bar cart. 

“Our considerable aid at the Dam was not meant to ensure room for this petty bid for independence-”

“Your poorly equipped, poorly trained cannon fodder? I think my air superiority and army of killer robots ensured that victory.” She kicked out a chair at the other end of the long table and dropped into it. Steepled her fingers, clicking her heavy signet rings together. The rings that used to belong to the three most powerful and ambitious men in the Mojave. The rings she looted off their corpses after she killed them with her bare hands and a judicious application of blunt force trauma. 

Esda nervously sat back and did not meet her gaze.

“Well,” she told the water damaged print of a man on a horse on the wall somewhere over Six’s shoulder, “it seems we’ve come to an impasse.”

* * *

Meanwhile, a somewhat less cordial and considered diplomatic negotiation was taking place on the casino floor. 

One of the NCR boys, uncomfortable by how close Angel and Blondie were sitting at the bar, hissed “Fuckin’ soft degenerates,” 

Angel turns faster than he can really think about what he’s doing and why and cracks the boy across the face with his own pistol. Saturday night’s fight at Vikki & Vance’s was suddenly moved up to Saturday afternoon. 

Six came out of the conference room so fast she sent the doorknob into the wall, and taking in the scrum fired a shot into the floor. 

“This one’s got a Legion mindset.” said Blondie by way of explanation, the instigator wheezing at his feet and another one in a chokehold. 

She went from tense and alert to furious and kicked the downed NCR boy in the ribs, breaking at least three ribs with sensible-heeled but fancy silver-tipped boots. “The Mojave can be a very unforgiving place, son.” she said in a dangerous tone, and looked up to find the man she’d installed as Sheriff.

“Meyers! Shoot anyone lately?” 

“Oh, not in _days_ , Courier,” he said, still staring at Blondie.

Six whipped around to see who he was staring at and tried and failed to hide a delighted grin. “They do clean up nice, don’t they?”

Meyers finally properly notices Angel and nodded politely around the soldier he’d grappled. “Howdy.”

“Drop that man.” she said to all three of them. Angel grumbled a bit and flung his soldier into the door.   

“Morals are boring. Manners are not.” she told Esda, spluttering about diplomatic incidents and retaliation.

Meyers herded the NCR out. “Best I escort you good folks out of town. We don’t take kindly to that sort of talk here. Blondie, always good to see you.” 

Angel gave Blondie a light, glaring at Meyers and Esda and the NCR soldiers carrying their fallen brother out of the casino. 

“What a terribly interesting stint in prison you did,” she said archly. 

“I don’t kiss and tell either,” he told her. 

“Prison?” Angel asked in surprise, still trying to process the previous sentence.

Blondie stared at the ceiling, and huffed out a cloud of cheap tobacco smoke along with a sigh.

Six rapidly put several pieces of wildly separate information together, gasped, and patted what she could reach of his upper arm in excitement. “Wait, was that thing in New Reno you?” 

Blondie sighed at the ceiling again. “Yes.”

“Why’d you let Tuco do that _astoundingly_ stupid plan?”

“I was young and I needed the money.”

“That was only two years ago! That’s one of the only things I remember from Before!” 

“Prison doesn’t seem like your style.” Angel remarked, and tried to anesthetize himself with good tobacco.

Blondie frowned at him through the bottom of a bottle of tequila.

Angel asked the room “Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland in search of our better selves?” and while Six was puzzling over where she’d heard that before, hunched over his own glass. This was preposterous. This emotion was unbecoming toward a business partner. It wasn’t like they were romantically together, or he wanted them to be together, or they’d ever be together. The real issue here was that he’d somehow thought Blondie above petty grift. 

“Light hand in there.” he told Six to change the subject.

She shrugged. “Let them think I want to be House. Gives us more breathing room for whatever comes next.”

That _was_ right, he realized. There was always something next with Six. A job with Blondie to look forward to. Even if it never meant anything more. Odd how he lived for that now.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are fewer liner notes than usual here because most of my research time was spent figuring out how electric trains and battery technology work, also running around in-game to figure out where the broken rail lines are, because the game only notes the uninterrupted/mostly intact ones. There’s a very weird inaccessible train tunnel going from behind the NCR Charlie camp to behind the emergency railyard for no particular reason??? It isn’t even a particularly big hill??? 
> 
> Layla is a real character that does try to hold you up outside Primm, but I’ve only been able to trigger her interaction once. 
> 
> Six’s rings are from Benny, House, and Caesar. There really wasn’t enough time to loot Olivier before throwing him off the Dam, and she’s a bit annoyed about that because two one each hand would be more balanced. 
> 
> Blondie has a t y p e and that type is dudes who will be silver foxes in like five more years.
> 
> Blondie and Tuco’s grift is the same one they pull in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I strongly recommend watching at least the first forty minutes of this movie (it’s on archive.org right here! https://archive.org/details/TheGoodTheBadAndTheUgly1966 ) because it really is an astoundingly poorly thought out plan. 
> 
> From Veronica’s wiki page: " “I was young and I needed the money” This quote is similar to when the Chosen One (as a Porn Star) says to Ethyl Wright: "Look, I was young and needed the money." "
> 
> “Where must we go….” is from the Mad Max franchise, which the first two Fallout games draw heavily from. Fury Road is by far the best one, but the original Mad Max is well worth watching for the tense world-actively-starting-to-fall-apart atmosphere. However! It is a schlocky 80s movie and treats its women and disabled characters accordingly, so be warned? 
> 
> To get the full experience of writing this, put Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Remastered/Deluxe Edition Album) on repeat but mostly Honky Cat, Bennie and the Jets, and Saturday Night.


	6. every moment hesitated

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we start and do not finish several dozen sidequests in this one as opposed to going on the main quest

Six hovered outside the Mojave Express building, then sucked air between her teeth and lunged for the door like someone without a kitchen towel who needs to get a cake out of the oven as quickly as possible and is trying to minimize the burn time.

A jangling Brahmin bell summoned an old lady, genie-like, from behind the back counter. 

Angel, whose only religion was the Old World maxim “be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet”, with the added knowledge that threats can and will come from anywhere, watched his employer’s shoulders tense and almost reached for his gun. 

Six dropped into a defensive stance to prevent her vital organs from being crushed in no worse threat than a rib-creaking hug. 

“Back for more of my casserole, Courier?” 

“Only if it won’t kill me dead!” 

“Well, what do you need?” 

Six, mortally offended, put a hand over her heart. “Miz Nash! I merely happened to be passing by and wanted to greet an old friend-” 

“Out with it! Radscorpions don’t cook themselves!” 

Six dodged a wooden spoon. “Laboratory glass- the fancy old ones? The ones that go-” and she described something that curled over on itself with a complicated hand motion. 

“Well, those _are_ rarities. You need ‘em intact and not hot?” At Six’s nod, she continued “I would have you look in Techatticup or RepCon or poor Doctor Rotson’s, but I would also advise you to take a big heap of Rad-X beforehand.” 

“Well, you come across any, you know where to send word.”

“Hear you’re having a bit of trouble up in your city. You can’t have our Sheriff Meyers back, we like him too much around here.” 

Six, still riding the high from winning the Ambassador Esda encounter and feeling a rare burst of benevolence, extricated herself from that conversation as quickly as possible. 

“Did any of that involve us?” Blondie finally asked, halfway back to the emergency railyard, wondering if there really was an  _us_. 

Six trailed a hand over the top of Courier Four’s gravestone. “I'll have better things for you to do than find trinkets for Arcade.” 

* * *

They returned on the first train home just after dusk (Blondie taking a catnap against a wall while Angel watched him sourly, _du_ _m vivimus vivamus)_ , to a city in chaos.

Smoke choked the streets, there was a shootout between refugees and longer-term residents over water in Freeside, an unrelated riot that spilled out of the Atomic Wrangler and caught up three streets, a road collapsed in Westside into the Underside and both sets of residents were pissy about it. Veronica and Raul were fixing the latter, happy as clams.

There were also two men eating fried dough and arguing on the Lucky 38’s front steps. 

Every alarm on the Pip-Boy went off at once for three seconds, flashing to a silent smiley face before Six flicked it off and looked askance.

“So what’s your story?” she asked, stopping so short that Angel almost walked into her.

“Oh!” said the blond one in a ridiculous red duster with too many buckles. “We’re looking for work.”

“No thank you, I already have one troublesome matched pair of gunslingers,” she said, and stepped around them. 

The dark-haired one looked horrified. “Not a _job_ job,” he said, spitting the word like it tasted bad, “just a temporary one-off job.”

Six sighed and leaned against her front door. “Okay, what can you do?”

She was handed a piece of paper and asked, as neutrally as possible, waving the paper in emphasis, “This is a wanted poster for someone named...Vash the Stampede?” 

Blondie and Angel glanced up at each other from behind Six, confirming they had never heard of a “Vash the Stampede”. 

Blondie supposed it wasn’t impossible for someone to get wanted posters printed on purpose, wanted posters had to come from somewhere. Stood to reason that a printer would be bribeable. He’d certainly paid as much attention to detail and done weirder things for jobs. 

Angel had never heard of this jumped-up young pup with idiotic hair and peculiar outerwear. He thought about the beginnings of his career, in well-maintained combat armor that all matched.  _Sic transit gloria mundi_.

His companion’s gun looked distressingly familiar. 

“It was for a good reason!” protested the blond one, Vash. “That bank was killing the town!”

Six looked at the poster again. “Boneyard boys? Were you Blades or Rippers?” 

“Neither,” said the other one, over Vash cheerfully piping “Rippers!”

“Weird gang name,” Six deadpanned, and turned to the more known quantities behind her. “Did you two want the Vault 11 job or...?” 

Angel frowned. Depressing things, Vaults. Constant small reminders of lives in a fragile Old-World bubble that had ticked along if not in comfort, at least routine; until some unknowable, indefensible outside force came and wiped it all out. Spooky. Crumbling. Too close-quarters for comfort.  

“What’s with the Vault that _they_ don’t want to do it?” the one with the higher perception stat asked, and Angel decided his Colt was merely similar to one Blondie sometimes carried. 

“Too tall,” Six dismissed. “Here, I’ll mark it on a map. I want to know who’s living there and if there’s anything valuable the city can use- water purification, food production, engines. Come back with a detailed map and there’s another fifty caps in it for you.” 

Vash gave Six the sloppiest salute Angel had ever seen, and finally got off her front steps, comfortably bickering with his companion all the way into Gomorrah. 

The front door popped open and Six fell into Christine. “Was that man a synth?” she said instead of greeting them. 

Six hummed an I-don’t-know. “I think he hacked the Pip without touching it? Worth keeping an eye on.” 

She almost closed the door on Angel before noticing them again. “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

Angel gestured after the other two gunslingers, heading into Gomorrah and still bickering. 

Six bristled. “I’m insulted, not only on my behalf, but on my wives’ behalf. You really think they’d _let a threat loiter on our front steps?_ If I can manage you two I can certainly handle...whatever the fuck was going on there.” 

Christine mock-pouted at them from behind Six. 

He nodded formally at Blondie, and stalked off to his side of town. 

* * *

She did not, in fact, have any jobs for them for nearly a week. 

He’d spent the week mostly alone, breaking down and cleaning and repairing every weapon he owned, wondering in a dull detached way what Blondie would say about some of the weirder guns in the footlockers under his bed. Thought about visiting Liza O’Malley, a freelance receptionist after the NCR left town with whom he’d had a long-standing...understanding, but didn’t. He paid Liza to leave upon completion of prearranged business transactions and to keep her mouth shut, and he found himself wanting those professional qualities less and less. 

It wasn’t that he wanted a long term romantic relationship,  Angel decided, he wasn’t built for one. Maybe he just needed to fuck Blondie to get it out of his system and then they’d never talk about it again and go back to normal. 

Pity he was coming to this realization on the front steps of the Lucky 38, on his way to meet with Blondie.  

Blondie was draped across a loveseat in a halfhearted argument about the efficacy of snorting healing powder with Six and Christine, draped across another loveseat.

He took an armchair and sat properly like a regular human person, waiting. 

 “Well, I’ve got some errands to do,” she finally says from behind a cold Nuka-Cola pressed to her forehead. “Nothing that really rises to contracting it out- except one thing.” 

Angel noted Blondie shifting minutely forward in interest, and noted Six noting this. She’d got Blondie hook line and sinker, he thought disapprovingly, but settled back to listen anyways. 

Some new backalley medic had a lead on laboratory glassware- lots of people got shuffled around before and after the Dam, and there had been plenty of defections on both sides when the remnants of both armies realized there was a third option that didn’t involve skulking home. Considerably more NCR than Legion stayed, given that Six tended to shoot first and ask questions later. 

“Anyway, none of this is verified, but it certainly _sounds_ plausible. Do you want to go to a museum with me and Rex?” she asked.  

“Are you joking?”

“I’ve never made a joke in my life,” she said, struggling to hold her mouth in a severe downward turn.

“Not a good one, anyway.”

“See? Even Christine- HEY- “ 

She kissed Six’s scarred knuckles with a look of such blinding pure adoration that whatever armor was still wrapped around his heart shuddered under the impact. Would he even survive someone looking at him like that? 

Angel locked that thought in a box where it couldn’t trouble him and decided now was _not_ a tactically advantageous moment to glance at Blondie. His follow-up question was “What, you’re not bringing the robot and four other people?”

“What, are you saying you think you can’t handle this simple urban exploration job? Do you perhaps want something that’s not a weird overgrown pistol to shoot at things, would that bring you more comfort?”     

* * *

Doing errands with Six and Blondie was marginally better than doing errands by himself. He knew she always had several dozen irons in the fire, but he and Blondie had never been so involved in the iron production business. 

They lurked in her wake far into the fringes of Freeside, where the wall just barely kept the Wasteland out. 

Rex-the-human was a nervous little man who did not offer details about which side he’d defected from, if any. He kept court in a crumbling store that had, once upon a time, sold meat. Now it sold basic medical care and dubious poultices and potions. Oddly, the only decoration was his medical equipment, walls grungy and bare of hastily-printed posters or colorful paint or even bright swags of cloth like his neighbor, a pawn shop. 

Blondie put himself between the medic and the nearest tray of scalpels. 

Rex-the-human sketched out a rough map on the back of a crumbling box of Abraxo, far in the North Vegas ruins outside the wall and beyond the tracks, and offered Six some sort of augmentation while she punched a rough marker into her Pip-Boy. She looked interested before sighing, “Arcade will kill me if I get another hack.” As Blondie tried to remember where he’d seen Rex-the-human before, she added  “Besides, what do I need muscles for? Put you boys out of a job.” 

Rex-the-human forces his mouth into the thinnest expression of emotion possible, more of a flat line carved across his face than a smile down at Rex-the-dog. 

Rex-the-human was, apparently, bitter rivals with Arcade. As Arcade had never mentioned any sort of rival in the field of stimpak medical research, Blondie suspected this was a one-sided non-mutual unknowing sort of rivalry. 

Angel wasn’t quite sulking against the doorframe, keeping an eye on the empty street, but he didn't look comfortable. 

Six chattered about everything and nothing on the way back, shot a giant rat for some street kids, checked on a new well. 

Inside the Lucky 38, Blondie coughed at Six, and when she turned, nodded at the map in her breast pocket. “That’s bait.” 

Six wrinkled her nose in consideration. “Good location for Old World stuff _and_ an ambush. Don’t think I’ve ever been out that far north in the ruins.” She shrugged at them. “We’ll have to be well-prepared. Morning run, bring something that shoots 5.56, only kind of ammo salvage that’s been coming out of the North lately.”

* * *

“Well-prepared” meant Six in full modified Rangers’ armor but no helmet, a huge stiff duster, and an ostentatious sling of grenades. 

They left two hours after dawn, when nearly all of New Vegas was settled down and insulated from the heat of the day in the big casinos that still had air-conditioning or underground in well-defended bunkers. Meandered along alleyways and byways through the ruins, shifting from the dense concrete rubble and blocked roads of the Strip to low-rises and one-story rows of dead businesses set farther back from the road. Kept to cover, far enough apart that a well-placed grenade or mine couldn’t take them all out. Looped and backtracked in a giant spiral closer to the museum as the day got hotter, and continued to find nothing, not even Raiders. 

Rex described big cloverleafs through the ruins, clearing building after building and finding nothing more suspicious than giant rats. 

They waited another hour from the rooftop of a nearby apartment building, watching the mostly-intact museum, until Six stood up, stretched, and ambled directly over. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet” is a direct unedited quote from US General Mattis, a war criminal. 
> 
> “dum vivimus vivamus”- while we live, let us live- is an Epicurean quote. Epicureanism is a form of hedonism focused on the absence of pain and fear through living a simple and modest life. Ya really got him there with that witty rejoinder in your head, Angel. 
> 
> The New Vegas dryish sewers don’t have a formal name, so I named them the Underside in order to match the Freeside/Westside theme. 
> 
> I’ve lifted the title of this chapter, Vash the Stampede, and his boyfriend Wolfwood, who I have just realized I never actually addressed by name, directly from the hit 1998 anime Trigun. I feel like there is already significant overlap in people who have seen it and people who are reading this, but lemme sell you on it: Do you like spaghetti Westerns with their higher than average ratio of gleeful nonsense? Do you like pining, mismatched gunslingers who tend to go on long philosophical rambles? Are you looking for a new anime with a minimum of creepiness towards its female characters, who aren’t oops-all-boobs? Watch Trigun! Come yell about it with me! It’s one season and a movie! It’s on Hulu! It’s on any number of less legal sites! What’s your excuse!
> 
> A synth is Fallout’s version of an extremely realistic human-shaped robot/digital lifeform with consciousness. There aren’t any in-game, they seem to be an East Coast phenomenon. 
> 
> Sic transit gloria mundi- so passes the glory of the world. This is, predictably, one of my favorite phrases in anything ever, but both the Latin mottoes in this chapter come to you courtesy of the Emily Dickinson poem “Sic transit gloria mundi” which I forgot I loved until I reread it today. 
> 
> Liza O'Malley is the NCR embassy's receptionist. You have the option to ask her "so what's your story?" and she tells you to fuck off. I feel like she would get along splendidly with Angel. 
> 
> “That’s bait.” from Mad Max: Fury Road, because I am a magpie stealing all my favorite bits from post-apocalyptic media and collaging them into whatever the fuck this is.


	7. collect, preserve, interpret, display

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which we all play tourist

“Thought it’d be bigger,” Angel said, trying to dust his hat off and do something with the oppressive, tense hush in the cratered parking lot of the ruined LAS VEGAS NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM! SPONSORED BY POSEIDON ENERGY! 

Confused by the silence, he turned to watch Blondie heave a sigh and stare at his boots. Six’s face rapidly flickered through a spectrum of emotions from near-infrared horrified to ultraviolet delight. 

“Well, you kids have fun. See you back in Freeside. Don’t hurt yourselves.” he said, somewhere between a warning and a benediction.

Batting her eyelashes, savoring her glee, Six pointed out, “Per your contract, pulling out forfeits eighty percent of your pay. Besides, what if I need a big bad gunslinger with a fourteen inch barrel in there?” 

The effect was somewhat lessened by the shit-eating grin.

Rex came back from a loop around the building and demanded pets for his service. “HI GOOD DOG,” she said in the very specific voice people use to talk to very good dogs, and heaved the very good dog up and through a broken window, worried about front-door booby traps.

“Do you think there’ll be an ambush in the building or as we leave?” she asked, trying to lean on the window frame instead of a shard of window pane. 

“I’d do it as we leave,” Blondie said. “Drive us back into the building, toss a few grenades after, watch it all come down on top of us.”

Angel tsked. “More efficient to trap the building or hide behind the front door. Hard to defend against something that close-quarters.”  

“What if they’ve gotten lost on the way here? Do you think they’re all right?” she gasped in theatrical concern. 

Blondie and Angel quickly dismissed this theory on the grounds that anyone who would go to this much effort for an ambush would certainly be on time. The alternative, too horrifying to imagine, was that there was truly no sense of professionalism or pride in your work left in the world. 

“Where the FUCK is my dog?” Six muttered after eleven minutes of listening to them place a bet and bicker about the odds. 

Somewhat comforted by the fact that there had been no barking or gunfire or general chaos, she kicked open the front door. Remarkably unconcerned, she danced around a giant flattened skull of some Pre-War creature, jawbone cracked in two and longer than she was tall. “I want it,” she announced, trying to get a foothold in the nasal cavity. 

“There are two kinds of people in this world,” Blondie said, tucking a grenade away for safekeeping and reaching for a cigar. “Those who carry guns and those who carry other things. I carry guns.” 

Six, trying to get her foot out of the skull, couldn’t twist back over her shoulder to frown at him. “That’s why I brought both of you, in case one of you decides you’re too good to carry loot.” 

“No.” said Angel. 

Rex looped back, a .32 pistol in his mouth, and dropped it at Six’s foot, tail wagging.

“There’s my PERFECT, EXCELLENT BOY, the only boy who’s NEVER disappointed me EVER in his PERFECT EXCELLENT LIFE,” she cooed, breaking it open to shake out the rounds almost automatically, and tucked it away in the folds of her duster somewhere.

Breaking the skull only a little, she staggered back, leaving a single track of plaster footprints. Rex play-bowed as she tipped the .32s into a bandanna she kept loose rounds in.

“Rexierexierexie, here, what a good boy, Rexie, search!” 

He snuffled, sneezed, and trotted away, tail still going like a metronome. 

The gift shop, conveniently located to the right of the entrance, was gutted. Nothing remained except empty shelves, a trapped tumbleweed, and rivers of broken glass. 

They toured the rest of the museum, looted by someone with no particular skill or care. 

Posters about the history of mining in Nevada curled in long, slashed ribbons off the wall in the mineral exhibit. Six crunched across the minerals, grinding together shards of gently fluorescing specimens and shards of glass, lit up by the unforgiving glow of whatever powered the Pip-Boy. A skeleton of a floor-to-ceiling glass cabinet ran across the back of the room, raying out shadows like a hand grasping as Six’s light whipped across it.   

The Pip-Boy crackled urgently as she examined something and muttered, “Not big enough, won’t keep a reaction going.” 

She violently sneezed three times, sending chaotic eddies of dust through the light. 

The Marine Life Gallery across the Grand Hall was full of broken, dried-out tanks. Sand and fine, crumbling bones spilled out of the biggest tank, which had taken most of the back wall with it when it fell. 

A plastic something had fallen to the floor from the ceiling. Angel nearly didn’t recognize it as a killer whale, it was so small and symmetrically marked. What remained of the carpet under it was pale dappled blue, like sunlight hitting the crest of a swell.

In the entire time Angel had been away from the coast, he’d seen an Old World painting or postcard of the sea twice. Both times, some ingrained sense-memory welled up, worn into him like tidemarks on the Enclave’s oil rig. He could almost smell the salt and the rot and the mist, hear the hollow  _ chunk _ of the waves against the struts, the silk-ripping sound of winter acid rain dissolving into the great glowing Pacific. The sea at night glowed constantly from the stars and from within, erasing the horizon line and mirroring the chaotic Milky Way, churned up in fantastic whorls and wakes by giant one-eyed sharks fighting masses of tentacles.  

A horrible scrabbling sound was a reminder that he was currently vulnerable on solid ground. Angel went for his gun before realizing he was alone in the gallery with Rex, who squirmed out of the pre-War killer whale to drop a dead radroach at his feet. 

He tried to turn away from memories that threatened to choke him like fishbones into the Treasures of Egypt room, predictably empty. No humans had been here in decades, judging by the radroach tracks in the dust. Beheaded plaster statues outside were surrounded by white-gold haloes of plaster and paint flakes.

Six and Blondie were in the Wild Nevada gallery, stopped dead in a funeral hush.  All of the smaller taxidermy mounts were gone, leaving a head- and tail-less coyote, something that looked like a Yao Guai before he realized someone had purposely hacked most of the skin off, a huge plaster cat covered in crazed glue, and a smattering of small antelope with broken legs that went extinct before the bombs dropped. The mangled, broken mount of something called either an elk or a mule deer blocked the other door. 

Six was visibly deflated, looking at the once-abundant Mojave. “Look at all that meat,” she muttered, tracing a hand along an antelope’s flank and coming away with a handful of hair. 

Blondie was going through a bad case of Old World blues. This gallery felt like a memorial to the pre-War desert, a tomb for all the animals the War had wiped out along with the people, and it felt like he should not be here. It was a dead room full of dead things in a dead building, built and protected and cared for by long-dead people. These were things someone thought were important enough to save in approximations of plaster and hide, even after nothing of them existed except in memory and they could never come back. People valued and cared for these things, and now they were in shreds on the floor, looted poorly. He was no stranger to looting- had done some himself- but with the intent of preserving things for his own use and not sheer destruction.

Every so often, he came across something from before the War- a sputtering hologram of siblings laughing, fingermarks worn into a radio dial, a silver straight razor carefully wrapped in tissue and flannel against possible tarnish. Tiny reminders in the scraps that filtered down with the fallout after the War that reminded him that pre-War people, who might as well have been a different species for all their conveniences and safety, had continued to be terribly human, who cared about their families and houses and the chores of living. He would never meet or know these people or the people that bombed them, Someone else wanted to kill them and he, who had done nothing wrong, still had to live with the fallout and the reverberating consequences throughout his whole life. 

Blondie mourned a world he’d never seen, Angel was still drowning in sea-memory, and Six was silent as they moved on. 

The main staircase leading downstairs was filled with rubble from the collapse of the Prehistoric Life exhibit, the Young Scientist Center and Classroom (SPONSORED BY POSEIDON ENERGY!) and the bathrooms. Rex was waiting for them in front of a flat gray door, and whined at them. 

“ What an excellent dog, truly and really the  _ very best boy _ in the WHOLE Mojave ,” she crooned, and sent him down the maintenance stairs, brain gel glowing faintly in the dark.

“New Vegas should have a Pre-War museum.” Angel said. “Learn from old mistakes.” 

Six said, blunt as an object, “That would be depressing. This is depressing.” She waved in the general direction of the accessible galleries. “Maybe we need a museum about what it’s like right now. I don’t know if there’s any Lakelurks  _ left _ . What if Deathclaws or Bighorners change in ten years? Would anyone remember or care unless it affected the meat somehow?” 

She went down the stairs before either of them could answer.

The African Savanna Gallery (whatever an African Savanna was), lit by the Pip-Boy, held huge fantastic leathery creatures, bigger than Deathclaws. A Human Evolution exhibit was scattered on the floor, plastic and real bones all mixed together. 

Rex sat, panting, in a storage room in front of a door with a keypad above the doorknob. 

Six nudged Rex out of the way and gave the door a hearty donkey kick. It shuddered, knocking a fine spray of rust to the floor, but nothing budged. 

Angel, in the interest of time, shot the keypad. 

Rex yodeled, jittering around Angel to bark at the door properly, furious alarm barks that reverberated through the basement. 

Six, in the middle of retrieving bobby pins from her hatband, let her hat fall to the floor in disbelief. 

“GOD Angel, you’re lucky you’re pretty,” she said in fury. 

Blondie snorted into his flask, resigned to his fate with a partner that had some sort of grudge against locks.

Faced with an attack on both flanks, Angel chose to focus on the more dangerous one and said “I would like to sleep in my own bed tonight, and playing tourist isn’t going to accomplish that.” 

"We're not leaving until we get into that room." she said.

Blondie tried kicking the door, which continued to do its one job and refused to open.

After another walkaround, they determined there were no other windows or doors to the room. 

Blondie stopped in the middle of ducking to avoid a vent and traced it back to a register in the African Savannah exhibit.  

Blondie and Angel looked at Six. 

She crossed her arms and slid down the wall with a muffled clatter, holding Rex off with an elbow. “I don’t WANT to go in the vent.” 

“It’s less than two feet wide.” 

The concrete floor crunched under her, gritty with sand and other things. “It takes me half an hour in the morning to put everything on.” she argued, leaning her shotgun and brush gun against a desk.

She turned around to face Angel and told Blondie, “Buckles under the shoulders.” While he fumbled with the pauldrons, she shoved her hat at Angel and glared daggers at him.  “We’re going to be here at  _ least _ another hour and it’s HOT OUT. I’m going to  _ roast alive  _ in the vents.”

Angel experienced a brief flicker of fear as Six turned what he thought was a long hair stick into a knife. He hadn’t known women could put their hair up with knives, but Blondie’s expression didn’t even flicker as Six eased another thin dagger out, dropped them both in her hat and leaned over to catch all her hair in one hand. 

She asked the floor, “Ladder?” and Blondie left to avoid holding things.

Once her hair was off her neck and out of her face, she dropped a full laser pistol, a pair of hold-out pistols, and a Bowie knife from underneath her forearm armor into the hat. 

Unbuckling the armor where it molded around her Pip-Boy, she wandered out into the hall, Angel in tow picking up armor pieces, to keep an eye on Blondie opening doors and Rex helping. 

Something lengthy and complicated happened, involving backing up against the doorframe just so and twisting in an upsetting shape to disengage the spine armor, then the duster came off and flew onto a desk where it lay in stiff metal-backed folds. 

Hiking one leg up against the wall to undo a knee pad, she continued, “It’s not like- Rex, keep your distance- putting everything on and taking it all off again is EASY. Some of us like to carry more than pistols,” she sniped.

Angel watched Rex trot around the corner, thought about his dead drops on the coast, and wondered if they were all still there. 

She produced a sawed-off shotgun from the small of her back. He ended up tucking it under his arm. 

There was a terrible crunching sound, the sound of a radroach dying, and a triumphant bark.

She gave him a flare gun and the damp .32 Rex found. Draped two bandoliers of ammo pouches, a string of four different types of grenades, and a shoulder holster with a snub-nosed silenced machine gun over his shoulders. 

“I’m just  _ so terribly excited _ about going into a room that’s been closed probably since the War, where I don’t know what’s inside, without any armor. And minimal weaponry.”

“You were just in Primm with minimal weaponry.” Angel felt the need to point out. 

She dropped the chestplate back down over her head to glare at him better. “I had three guns. And the both of you to cover me, so that’s at least three more guns.”

She took off the belt with Benny’s gun, and produced a machete strapped to the other leg. “Angel, please tell me you walk around with more than a pocketknife and whatever the fuck your pistol is.”

Blondie had stopped pretending to look for a ladder, the better to hear, and Six pulled a long combat knife, a switchblade and a straight razor out of her boots while she waited. 

“I don’t walk around with just a pocketknife and a pistol. I’ve been staying alive to do my job for a very long time before you came around.” 

Six, in the middle of unlacing a cut-down leather jacket that kept the breastplate from chafing, snorted. “You’re not that much older than me. You two are only five years apart.”

Angel glanced, startled, at Blondie who had given up all pretense of searching another closet and poked his head back out. Angel’s worldview tilted back as Six handed him a beautiful little .45 with a snakeskin grip and a less beautiful antler-grip model. She sighed down at her tall boots, not excited about undoing a million laces. 

“How do you not know each other’s birthdays?  _ I _ only know them because I made you both write down who to notify in case you die and what you want on your tombstones but both of you just put the other one down which  _ isn’t very useful to me. _ ” __

Down to the tough jeans and linen undershirt she favored, she replaced the trio of throwing knives in her chest wrap with Benny’s gun, tucked a switchblade into her thick tall socks and flipped a Bowie knife into a reverse grip. 

Rex loped back, wiggled between her legs, and dropped another radroach at her feet.

“Oh,  _ good boy _ ! Thank you, I hate it!” she cooed, scratching his chest. Satisfied, he wriggled out and sat near the door, head cocked.  

Back at the accessible vent entrance, she told Blondie “I need someone tall.” On his shoulders, knife between her teeth, she punched the register out and hoisted herself up. 

She yelled, presumably at Angel, “If I die, Veronica and Christine will NOT give you the mercy of an easy death.” 

They followed her progress out of the exhibit and into the hall, where a panel gave out and she almost fell with a terrible echoing scream, dropping her knife. 

Blondie handed it back, and she heaved herself over the gap. 

There was a sound like a small woman kicking a vent out and falling from the ceiling.

Six opened the storeroom door, covered in long streaks of grime. Rex snorfled at her elbows in interest.

“That was good and great fun.” she said, and triple sneezed again

The gift shop deadstock was miraculously intact- there were pocketknives with dinosaurs on them, toy POSEIDON ENERGY tanker trucks, tubes of small plastic dinosaurs melted together in one eldritch mass of limbs, a wild nest of thin neon T-shirts. 

Six picked up a miraculously intact snowglobe and shook it like a martini.“Oh, HELLO, two thousand caps!” she said, a multi-millionaire who owned 300,000 square feet of property.  

“Oh, no, wait, doesn’t go with the set. And he’s dead,” she said, reminding herself with a little shake of her head, and put it back. 

Rex pawed at a locked metal case of what turned out to be 85th anniversary commemorative pistols, with a striped horse on one side of the grip and the long skull from the front room on the other.

Most importantly, there were a dozen toy chemistry kits in slim metal cases. Each kit had six intact test tubes, two glass stirring bars, a beaker half the size of a shot glass, and an eyedropper.

Six tipped little packets and cardboard packaging out onto the floor. “We don’t need all that other shit in there, pack up the glass and let’s get the  _ fuck _ out of here.” She sneezed once, violently, and left to get dressed. 

It took all three of them a sweaty, sweary ten minutes to realign her spine armor with the armor underneath the duster, and they were done packing all the labware into two emptied kits long before she was done putting her respectable arsenal away. 

At the giant skull, Rex snarled and slunk low out of the door, ready to launch himself at a dozen men fanned out in the parking lot. 

Blondie remembered, too late, that a younger Rex-the-human with more hair had once gone by Thessalus. He’d thrown bags of healing powder at his  contubernia  before their disastrous final mission in the Dune Sea. 

“Gentlemen,” Six said, sweet as antifreeze. “We’d thought you’d gotten lost. Everyone all right?”

The leader screamed “The Legion has survived Caesar!” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the four goals of a modern museum, according to a tour guide at the Penn Museum. 
> 
> General museum notes: Thank you, Las Vegas Natural History Museum (not sponsored by Poseidon Energy, as they and I think it is somewhat hypocritical to take money from a destructive energy company in the name of nature education) for putting a floor map and a Google Maps walkthrough on the internet. All the exhibits mentioned are the permanent exhibits as of the time of writing, I’ve just added another staircase. There’s a real, very large something from the crocodile family skull in the back of the building, someone gave up trying to loot it. Two-headed or one-eyed sharks aren’t unheard of, but don’t tend to survive a full pregnancy. 
> 
> I imagine eco-anxiety is extremely much worse in an irradiated wasteland.
> 
> You know how in old Westerns someone walks into a dark room, lights one tiny oil lamp, and the whole room slowly brightens to whatever the lighting needs to be to establish the mood? Pretend that’s what’s happening in the basement with the Pip-Boy. 
> 
> All of Six’s weapons exist in-game, except for the hairstick knives. I originally stole the flare gun from Mad Max: Fury Road because the Pip-Boy can only receive not send and she needs to be able to signal somehow, but tumblr user @morrak has very kindly pointed out you can obtain a flare gun in the Lonesome Road DLC. I owe a great debt to the “remove, please” scene from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1QayMdUiQs) and the “Welcome to Bartertown” scene from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcKkb5buJI). for helping me write this scene. 
> 
> The Triceratops pocketknife exists. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Genuine-Colonial-Knife-Collectable-Vintage-Pocket-Knife-Triceratops-NEW-/293162208815
> 
> I imagine the chemistry kits look like this. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Porter-Chemcraft-Chemistry-Kit-Junior-Set-605-Rare-Circa-1958/202725299491?hash=item2f335e9523:g:~QoAAOSwUnpdHZFk I have a similar metal box from one of these kits that I use to keep aquarium supplies in. 
> 
> There’s a sidequest where you can find snowglobes in various locations and sell them to House. Six, also fond of baubles and trinkets, has kept the snowglobes on their rack in the game room. 
> 
> The 300,000 square feet of property comes from very rough approximations- she owns the Lucky 38, the Tops, House Tool Co, and probably a bunch of other buildings in Vegas if she ever cared enough to poke through House’s paperwork. Here’s a cool site where a fan tried to find the real-world counterparts of all the major in-game locations. http://www.falloutnewvegastour.com/2011/04/location-21-strip-tops.html
> 
> Thessalus of Traellus was Nero’s physician, and arch nemesis of Galen.


	8. everybody hit the pyro cue (graphic depiction of violence)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> next move? spring the trap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please mind the rating uptick to Explicit and the additional warning for graphic violence! this chapter will be briefly summarized in a future chapter, so don't feel bad for skipping it. there's a minimum of four things happening at once in this one I'm sorry about the verb tenses and I want to stop looking at this chapter

There was a brief, horrified hush as Six landed, coming out of a tuck and roll on one knee, hat gone, grenades already in hand. 

She didn’t make a bad joke or a snippy comment. She threw four grenades at once, bowling them across the parking lot at the centurion. 

The sound was bad- the grenades blowing in a quadruple concussive thud, a brittle Corvega sunroof catching on fire, men screaming. 

They bolted down the side of the building to the scant half-shelter of a long yellow bus, Six blasting a full shotgun drum behind them like shells were free. She cackled to herself, finally in her element- creating a space for herself by causing as much chaos as possible and using that chaos as another weapon. 

Blondie had just enough brain processing power left over from recognizing the Legion wedge formation trying to drive them back into the museum to note a weird relief. These were solvable problems. He knew how this motley contubernia (that clearly hadn’t trained together) would try to pin them down. He knew how to find cover. He knew how to cover Angel’s back. Possibly the only thing he knew how to do at this point was kill. 

Grenades were effective wedge separation devices, but the wedge had split evenly into a pincer. Six’s infamous luck had come up snake eyes- only one man lay screaming in the rubble, half his leg gone. 

“Well _that’s_ still too many,” Six said to nobody in particular, and sent Rex off and under the bus.

The first Legion soldier rounded the street-facing tail end of the bus, shrapnel studding his right side. Six utilized in-situ resources by cracking him across the face with a spent shotgun drum to get his throat in range and flinging it into the side of a tiny nuclear microcar in one venomously fast motion. She held him there, pulled out a sawed-off shotgun from the small of her back, ducked a swinging SMG, and jammed the sawed-off into his side where the armor didn’t quite meet. 

Still ducking under his arm, she was reloading and on to the next before he hit the ground, kneecapped another man to get him out of her way, and launched herself off his back instead of going around.

Living in New Vegas had taught Blondie the pain that numbers can bring, and he’d stayed alive this long by specifically avoiding impossible odds. He would have very much liked to disappear behind the museum and lose the Legion in the warren of ruined North Vegas, but he couldn’t, because Six was already halfway across the street trying to relieve the pressure on them and Angel’s stance solid against his back was not the stance of a man who wanted to cut and run.  

Angel hated running gunfights. He preferred gathering information, being well prepared, and good cover. He wanted to force the Legion to come to him, and pick them off at his leisure. 

He scooped the Legion SMG off the ground, kicking viscera out of his way, and emptied it into the wing coming around the nose of the bus. Blondie was snug against his back, Colts barking sharp and deliberate, covering Six. 

Survivors driven back behind the bus, he threw a look over his shoulder to check on Rex and Six, carving a bloody path across the street to a tangle of cars in front of a strip mall, the centurion and half the unit peeling off after her. 

Rex had a decanus by the arm. Six took off his helmet and most of his ear with a machete to clear the way for three close shots to his skull.

Blondie’s hands would never be clean, all he could do was wash them in more blood, but he did pride himself on fast kills. He gifted the men Six crippled neat little forehead holes. Fully half of them were young recruits with underpowered handguns, except for a centurion and three decani in better armor. 

Caesar was the Legion, and the Legion was dead. It would have been so easy for them to slink off after the Dam and start a new life. Why were they still here? 

Across the street, Six was cursing a blue streak. This narrow, cluttered parking lot was cramping her style. She liked room to dance. 

During the chaotic months they were in House’s employ, following Six across the Mojave, they kept running across evidence she’d been there but rarely saw her. She left long, messy streaks of blood in her wake- Raider guts spread down two miles of old highway, a Legion raiding party scattered through a cave, long trails of ichor leading to holes where radscorpions had crawled off to die.  

Like Six, Blondie wanted distance between them and the Legion. They needed to be under better cover, preferably away from the  patchy cover in the parking lot and across the street with her, but if he were a centurion, he’d put a sniper- ah, there.

“SNIPER! GAS STATION ROOF!” 

Angel, moving to get a better angle around the nose of the bus, dove under a sedan.

“Fuck OFF,” Six yelled, and optimistically hurled a grenade. An EMP flared on top of the gas station, and she hissed before whooping in triumph as the sniper fell two stories. Equally optimistic, Blondie put a shot in him, and Rex took care of whatever was left. 

Blondie used the brief reprise to join Angel behind the Chryslus and reload. Pre-War vehicles could only take so many hits before they went up, and he didn’t like how the bus was hissing. 

It had been a while since they’d actually killed anyone for her, and Angel had forgotten how Blondie’s capable hands on a gun got to him. He did appreciate a man who was good at his job. 

“Blondie!” he snapped, and tucked himself between Blondie and the car as he reloaded. Blondie turned and caught a Legion soldier right between the eyes.

He heard the sharp splat of a laser pistol against armor, and hoped it wasn’t Six’s armor. Her brush gun boomed, and someone else started dying messy and slow. 

Blondie slammed someone’s head in the sedan door and put a shot in his head for good measure. 

The centurion discovered his whole flank was gone, and left a decanus to bait Six out of the parking lot while he turned back toward them.

Blondie wasn’t sure why they were here or if Six really needed help. She was currently flowing up and under a Super Sledge’s reach to kick its owner between the legs to crumple him over a sawed-off to then blast both barrels. She almost slipped in the blood. 

The only man not on the ground screaming was the centurion, a burly man in better armor and a metal fist. 

Six slid over the hood of a Corvega, juking around the car with the sunroof on fire, and on the other side Blondie and Angel started converging on her position.  

The car made a new crater in the parking lot, halide-bright. 

Angel heard a surprised grunt from Blondie, under the thin whine of his hearing dying, Rex yelping, and Six’s squealing Pip-Boy as she rolled to put out her duster. 

She got up, shaking her head and staggering for half a step before the second sniper caught her full in the shoulder.

Angel wasn’t sure if the second sniper was dead, but he hit something. 

He turned to find Blondie trying not to bleed out, one hand over his bicep, gun loose in his right hand. 

Six was off the ground and in the air, the centurion holding her by the throat with a ballistic fist.  

This might be how he dies, Angel realized. Blondie is out, Six is good as dead, and unless she did something catastrophically stupid and lucked out they’re done, here among dead men strewn about the dead parking lot of a dead museum about a dead world. 

Well. It was a good run. He’d done his best to finish the job and watch Blondie’s back.  

The centurion dropped Six and spun to put her between them in a chokehold, and Angel thought _Memento, homo_. 

Six wasn’t home. Some stranger was behind her eyes, someone made out of raw fear focused on reflex and survival. She sunk her teeth into his forearm, ripping away a long strip of flesh as he yelled and threw her. She hadn’t dropped Benny’s gun in all this, and she and Angel and Blondie all shot the centurion in one deafening burst of fire. She wasn’t thinking about the landing, and hit a car with a sickening thud.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the title is from the "Party Poison" by My Chemical Romance, off the album Danger Days. fuck off ok it's a good fucking album 
> 
> the game goes into great detail about how information-gathering for the Legion looks like, and how they have a spy network, and there's a great deal of infiltration that happens before Caesar takes over a new territory. since my target audience for this fic (the four people who yell at me on Tumblr) have not played the game, I'm trying to be more explicit about lore in the author's notes. 
> 
> the Legion mostly follows historical Roman military constructs. A contubernium is the smallest unit of six men, led by a decanus. A centurion leads ten contubernia. The newest recruits are cannon fodder with bad armor and worse weapons, and if they prove themselves in battle they get better armor. 
> 
> nuclear-powered cars exist, bc the Resource Wars drove up the price of gas to well over $1k/gallon. they're fairly unstable, and can and will explode, although this happens to me more often in Fallout 3 than New Vegas. 
> 
> Six's shotgun gutshot is inspired by the Mad Max video game, which is not a particularly good video game but does have some cool movesets. https://youtu.be/r2TbteNKOF4?t=59 (violence warning also for this clip)
> 
> "In New Vegas, we know the pain that numbers can bring us. Well, so does Guy Mitchell, who's got Heartaches by the Number." -Mr New Vegas.
> 
> Memento, homo, is not only very funny but is part of the Ash Wednesday remembrance "Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris." or "Remember, man, that you are dust and unto dust you shall return." I KNOW Christianity didn't survive into postapocalyptia (thank God) but Church Latin seems like the most likely form to survive through the centuries.


	9. 1:1 broc flower and xander root

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> angel "hold on let me compartmentalize this real quick" eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there are mentions of needles and wounds and the care and fixing thereof in this one just fyi. one brief mention of canon-typical medical experimentation.

Six got up. She always got up.

Rex made it to her first, dragging one metal leg, whining and licking her face.

A moving Six wouldn’t die in the next five minutes, and Angel’s day would get immeasurably better if Blondie would stop bleeding all over the parking lot, so he snatched an open bag of healing powder out of a dying man’s hand and shot the dead man in the head for good measure to shut up his moaning. He ripped the cord out of the little leather pouch and took a proper look at Blondie’s arm. Angel was shocked to find, with a weird sort of relief he shoved aside to catalog later as he pressed healing powder right through the cut in his jacket, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. A deep slice that needed stitches, various other nicks and scrapes all down his right side, but Blondie had survived worse. Stop the bleeding with healing powder, Med-X, two stimpaks, stitches. RadAway for everyone once they got back to New Vegas. If they got back to New Vegas.

That was settled, then. 

He focused on applying pressure as they hobbled over, trying to do the mental calculus of who and what he could carry back to the city versus the merits of hunkering down until dawn. Blondie was losing a concerning amount of blood. If Six had yet another serious head injury, she couldn’t stay out in the ruins for a full night. The dog was crippled, dragging one metal leg and licking the blood off her face. It wouldn’t be faster to send it back, and he couldn’t leave them both to get Arcade.

He tried to inflict his will on the world. It would be a glancing flesh wound that needed stitches on one and an overdramatic head wound on the other. Head wounds always looked bad, even if they turned out to be nothing, he tried to tell himself. Bleeding helped clear the wound of bacteria and infection, he heard Lieutenant Commander Poligle-Caprone bark in his head.

Six was swaying a little, using the dog as support, wind and momentum knocked out of her. She stole Blondie’s flask right off his belt, making a punched-out little noise when her shoulder rolled wrong. It turned into a wheezing cough that had Angel worried for the integrity of her windpipe as he took in the slice over her ear, the blood running down her other ear, a new collar of darkening bruises and broken skin around her throat. She washed her mouth out with tequila and threw up, flinging the flask across the parking lot. 

Blondie watched it go with mild irritation. It was a cheap tin thing, but he wasn’t going to come close to breaking even on this job anyway.

“Fine, ‘m fine,” she lied reflexively, and wobbled over to the Super Sledge decanus, very loud for a man with half his intestines gone. Turning an idea over, she kicked a pistol out of his reach. 

She had to cough, restart her lungs and her sentence. “Anyone coming back for you?” Sounded like she had one foot in the grave, the hill at Goodsprings trying to claw her back. 

“The regicide herself,” he burbled through the blood.

She crouched, overbalanced a little in the puddle of blood, and put a hand on his abdomen. 

Blondie would take the memory of that scream to his own deathbed. 

She had to grind the words fine to get them past her throat. “Times four. No support on this one?” 

“No one’s coming back. Supposed to kill yourself. If you can’t get back to camp.” Blondie said, nodding toward the pistol. 

Six turned to him with something like horror. Angel turned to him with something like a realization.

The decanus squinted at Blondie, started to say “You-” before Six put three bullets in his head with his own pistol and coughed again, disappointed. “Everyone wants to be Caesar now he’s dead. Nobody wants to put in the work of surviving me.”

Angel didn’t bother walking around the pools of blood in the parking lot, and leaned them up against a storefront while he kicked the door down and sent Rex in. He didn’t like leaving a battlefield in an unknown state, but he preferred getting everyone stable first. There was a boarded-up back door, nothing alive, and a solid counter to shelter behind. Good enough. 

* * *

Six coughed, spat, and rasped out “Who’s got-” She tried to tuck herself into a corner but slowly crumpled instead, using Rex to slow her fall. “The- _fuck_! The fancy glass?”

She’d paled to Blondie’s usual deep tan. Blondie, trying to look like he wasn’t leaning on the counter, looked positively ghastly.

“I do. Sit down before you fall down.” Angel told Blondie. He put himself between his wounded employer and his wounded...something, and the door. 

His unreliable heart froze, traitorous, when Blondie slid to the floor without arguing. 

He’d had a lot of colleagues, with varying degrees of competency. He’d killed a lot of colleagues. It would be deeply unfair of Blondie to die from a bit of metal that wasn’t a bullet, to not go out honest in a purifying burst of gunfire. 

He looked up from Blondie’s blood dripping on the floor to check on Six, sweaty and pale and staring off into the middle distance. 

Angel hated bodyguard jobs. If your employer died, you failed _and_ didn’t get paid, and he was never sure which was worse. No good way to gather more intel in the middle of a job or pursue alternate options. So much easier and less stressful to kill people than keep them alive. Well, he wasn’t _technically_ Six’s bodyguard, he thought, digging out a med kit. This was an exploration/salvage job, not a bodyguard job, so if Six died from getting hit in the head one too many times he hadn’t _technically_ failed and was in the clear, he thought, a little manic.

Six took a deep stuttering breath, slapped a panel open in Rex’s side, rolled up a coat cuff, and dug out a little leather roll. She discarded a broken Med-X, took out an intact stimpak, and passed the rest to Angel over Blondie’s head. 

She sent the dog off to go find chems, like that was a normal thing for a dog to do. It obediently hobbled into the street, metal leg catching on the splintered threshold. 

“Do stimpaks do anything for concussions?” asked Angel, fiddling with something behind Blondie, clear doubt in his voice. 

Six’s voice broke in the middle of an ambivalent verbal shrug. “Not a concussion. Don’t feel like one.”

Blondie watched in fascinated horror as she scrunched her entire face up and blindly jabbed herself in the inner thigh.

Angel jabbed him with Med-X through his jacket. Blondie jolted, and got a gloved hand in his hair shoving his face back around. Angel carefully packed up two-thirds of his worry in a little mental box- never good to be too relaxed- and how pliant and easy Blondie went in a different little mental box. He wondered what Blondie’s hair, that artfully careless quiff rumpled to hell and back felt like without gloves. 

“Healing powder would have done it,” Blondie grumbled, and remembered that cigarillos existed.

“I need you up and about within the hour, not within three to five buisness days.” Six said, testing how much her shoulder wanted to move, armor creaking. True to Six’s luck, the sniper hadn’t had a hollowpoint, but you could sit a bottle of Nuka-Cola in the dent, cracks spiderwebbing out.

Angel, in a rare flare of anger at the Legion that’d taught Blondie he wasn’t worth much more than healing powder, fumbled out a lighter and made the mistake of looking up. Blondie was watching him, not the flame, all blown pupils and hollowed cheeks and ruffled hair and blood spatters and that little mental box was getting pretty full. He wondered, not for the first time, how Blondie got more appealing when wounded. If he even existed when Blondie wasn't looking at him. What was wrong with him to desire hurt men. 

Angel manhandled a slash in the jacket near the crook of his elbow open and put two stimpaks in Blondie before he could complain around the cigarillo. If his hands were a little shakier than usual, neither of them mentioned it. 

Six leaned over to frown at Blondie’s mangled sleeve, studded with bits of Corvega Chrysler.  Her pupils were evenly blown from the stimpak, at least. Probably not concussed. “No salvaging that. And we gotta- I dunno- rinse that out or something.” She reached out, a little aborted movement, and put a calm professional mask on.  
“Can you- does Angel... hrm. You want I should kick Angel out? Could take the sleeve off?”

“Neither of you have medical training.” Angel pointed out. 

Blondie was turned toward Six, and Angel missed his face as he sighed and said “He knows.”

“Oh! So you do talk to each other!” she said with a lopsided, startled grin.

Angel didn’t bother to dignify that with a response.

“I think pasts in fascist military organizations are important information,” she continued, cheerfully mangling a shoulder seam.

Blondie tried to make pointed eye contact with Angel.

Angel, very busy in a little aluminum ex-Enclave medical case, asked “How’d _you_ pry his torrid past out?” 

Six’s huff turned into a hacking cough. “You too could hang out in the air conditioning and drink all my tequila and have fun. Door’s open.” 

Blondie raised his cigarillo in an ironic little toast. 

Of course Blondie existed outside their jobs. He’d made that abundantly clear over the past week’s parade through a stable of old lovers. Foolish.

The dog limped back in, dropped a bloodstained pouch of healing powder in Six’s lap, and tried to lick her face.

* * *

While he sutured Blondie’s arm, Six hacked up some more blood. It was uncomfortably like the time they’d first properly met her, popping out of the Lucky 38’s emergency hatch, soaked in House’s blood. 

Satisfied three stimpaks would keep Blondie stable long enough for him to figure out how much pain Six was masking, Angel changed gloves.

She leaned her head back, letting him see deep imperial purple spreading down from the point of her jaw to the notch in her collarbone, wrapping up and around under her chin. He could see where every rivet in the palm had been, dark manmade constellations. Fine slices like Lakelurk gills wrapped around right angles to her existing collar of vertical scars. Her earlobe had been caught, silver stud ripped out somewhere in the parking lot.

Not for the first time, he wondered if she’d been awake when she got the scars running along her scalp.  

He soaked a clean bandanna in the last of his drinking water and reached out to clean the blood slowly beading, a quieter sort of horror than watching the blood run down Blondie’s arm. 

She flinched back, her eyes wide and scared and sad and resigned. He knew how she felt and handed the damp bandana over, said “Girls’ll be scared to death, you show up like that.”

The vibration from trying to grumble something under her breath sent her into another coughing fit. She took a shuddery breath, held the thin cotton to her neck, and held out an arm to Angel, palm up. Blondie distracted her by offering her a cigarillo, and while Six was frowning at him Angel gave her another stimpak right through the leather. 

“Should clean that head wound out.” 

She gave him a watery smile. “Oooh, what’s gonna happen if I don’t, I get another scar on my face?”

“It goes septic and Arcade has to take your head off to save your life.”

“Is it really that bad? You worry me when you joke.”

“Need stitches there and in your ear.”

Six checked her ears, tried to grumble again. “I _liked_ those.” Blocking his hand again, she said, “Fine, I’ll hold it all down with a bandanna and Arcade can yell at me when we get back. Last thing I need is another weird little short patch on that side."

She refused Blondie's canteen. "I will throw it up."

She stuffed the extra stimpaks back in the dog, shifted to the other wall behind the counter, started to notice her surroundings. “Is that a _dick_? Angel, where have you brought us?” 

There were in fact some dildos jutting up proudly, next to clear tubes of plastic with colorful jelly melting and congealing in wild horrible swirls.

Blondie hadn’t known it was possible for Angel’s face to go any tighter. 

Six let out a more unhinged cackle than usual, gasped, and almost grabbed her ribs. “Okay okay okay okay okay okay. Here’s what we’ll do. Gimme fifteen minutes in here, and then you two can have fifteen minutes in here, and we’ll never speak of this again. Okay? Okay. Get the fuck out.” She heaved up, failing to throttle a whimper, and started towards the back wall. 

“You’re probably concussed-” 

She threw a dildo at Angel. “I am completely cured.” 

* * *

Blondie and Angel and Rex spent a completely silent fifteen minutes outside.

Blondie did not think about what Angel might pick out, how he might look under him. 

She came out, looking extremely smug, satchel looking exactly the same. 

Blondie said “Do you know how much these things are worth?” to a bemused Angel and disappeared inside. 

Six dumped water on a bandanna and arranged it around her temples, slid on sunglasses with heavy side shields, sent Rex off to find her hat. 

Angel was studiously not thinking about Blondie in nothing but the collar and cuffs tumbled in a pile of decaying leather near the door. He felt a slight pang of guilt for the third time in his life. He’d seen the scars on Blondie’s wrists. They should be gold anyway, Blondie would never accept anything less than a matched set. 

“The dreamers of the day are dangerous men.” Six said from under her hat, trying to adjust the stampede strings so they didn't hit her neck, and refused to tell him where it was from. 

Blondie came out with a suspiciously discreet briefcase.

They both looked at Angel.

Angel frowned back, safe behind his aviators.  

“Okay!” she said with considerably more cheer than any of them felt. “Time to go home!”

Angel forced his voice even and pointed out, again, “You have suffered severe head trauma. You should be lying down.”

“I’ve hit my head harder than this and I’m still alive.” She fiddled with something on Rex’s back, and two handles popped out. She depressed the  back handle, and looped a belt through the front one. “It’s two hours at least to get to the north gate, let’s giddy the fuck up. Rexie, home!” The dog’s momentum carried her off, shuffling through the sand instead of her usual light step.

* * *

Miles were currency to a courier, and Six spent three trying to convince Angel that everything had gone much better than it could have. 

“I take care of my friends,” she said, smoothing over a join in the conversation where Angel had stopped cold.  “Are we not friends?” she asked after half a block, trying to be flippant but with an undercurrent of genuine concern. 

“You’ve paid me too much money not to be,” Angel said after a beat.  

“Please. Pretty men are two for a bottlecap. I keep you two around because you’re useful. Both of you together have cost me…” She gave up trying to do math in her head after a full block of blasted-out storefronts.  “Much more than a bottlecap and are _much_ more expensive than rentboys. And more useful.”

“Small price to get off on violence.”

“That would be an incredibly convoluted and expensive way of getting my rocks off when I, once the most eligible bachelor in New Vegas, could have whoever I wanted for free,” 

“Bachelorette, you’re a lady.”

“Which am I, a lady or a bachelorette?”

Blondie entered the fray. “You’re no lady, you’re a Courier.” 

Six, semi-compulsively checking a mailbox, tried not to aggravate her throat with a laugh.

“There isn’t enough in that for two laughs,” Angel said.

“Angel, Angel, Angel,” Six said, for a second sounding so like Tuco’s breezy dismissiveness that Blondie’s tired heart skipped a beat. He had a half-mad moment of wondering how adding Tuco to a job would even work before Six continued “Lighten the fuck up. We’re all alive, going home under our own power, we got some of the fancy science shit Arcade wanted, a commemorative pistol, and killed some people who were trying to kill us.” 

Angel could not technically argue with any of this, but tried anyway.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Combining one broc flower with one xander root makes one bag of healing powder. 
> 
> One million thanks to tumblr user @teacupnatasha for answering my billion medical questions. 
> 
> Other things I did for this fic: squicked myself out trying to learn about blood loss and sutures and various kind of injections and which medicines which injection sites go with and also almost gave myself a panic attack by grabbing my own neck to figure out where Six’s new wounds would be. 
> 
> In my brain, the Enclave are closest to the Marines than any other branch, and Marine doctors have Navy ranks. Lt Commander is a midrange O4 rank which seems reasonable to me. “Monocryl is a synthetic, absorbable suture manufactured in Cornelia, Georgia, USA, and trademarked by Ethicon. It is composed of poliglecaprone 25, which is a copolymer of glycolide and epsilon-caprolactone. It comes both dyed (violet) and undyed (clear) and is an absorbable monofilament suture.” from wiki. My patented method for getting OC last names is to find a plant or chemical compound that reminds me of them, look at the scientific name or the components, and then slice and dice until you get something that sounds good. Sometimes, like with our good medical instructor here, all you need to do is add a hyphen. 
> 
> Did you know Med-X was originally called “morphine” in Fallout 3 but then Australia got pissy and banned it so Bethany Esda had to take out all references to real-world drugs?
> 
> Six and Blondie hate needles for different reasons- Six because she’s been unethically experimented on, and Blondie bc the Legion, like many cults, doesn’t Do medical care or chems or stimpaks. In-game, all they carry are the weakest craftable healing items. NOT GREAT
> 
> What the fuck is a stimpak? It’s also made out of broc flowers and xander root. It’s a sci-fi flavored health potion, there’s really no way for it to work IRL, I have always privately assumed it contains more adrenaline than anything. Healing powder is a weaker version, I’ve always assumed it was styptic powder, or you could mix it with water for a weak first aid cream type thing. 
> 
> “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” -T. E. Lawrence.
> 
> “There isn’t enough in that joke for two laughs,” -Jane Russel in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jane also pops up in-game.


	10. who are you to tell me i'm finished?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which we push ourselves to the brink of exhaustion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mentions in this chapter of: Six making another very messy kill, Six doing some psychological torture, people's wounds being fixed and patched up (including mentions of needles and closing up wounds). also smoking and alcohol, but that's been in every chapter if we're honest and I continue to receive ZERO DOLLARS from Big Tobacco. I would LOVE to receive some dollars from Big Tobacco to further my gay agenda.

Rex and Six shivered, almost at the same time.   
“Got a bad feeling- aw _fuck!_ ” Six dropped the leash and got off a grenade at a two-headed deathclaw looming against the sun behind them, half-blind but still dangerous. 

Rex was off, hassling the beast to buy them time to run the last block of ruined houses. They burst into the clearing around the north Freeside gate, Six sent up a flare sparking bone-white like a small personal cloud, and the deathclaw went down with a hole in each head.

Six whooped “Christine!” and waved frantically at the wall before jogging back to the deathclaw, twitching in a giant crumpled pile. 

Angel was certainly not panting, but did find himself needing more air than usual. He kept an eye on Blondie, leaning against a streetlight like he meant to. It was within acceptable finishing-a-job parameters to see Blondie on his feet and not bleeding. The poncho covered many sins.

They weren’t in the safety of a building with a real door that closed yet. He didn’t have the time or energy to think about why he was so worried about such a minor injury. The only one who had been in any real danger was Six for about thirty very bad seconds. He would bury the memory of Blondie’s hair in his gloved hand, and Blondie looking at him like _that_ , and they’d go back to quietly running jobs for Six and things would go back to an understandable equilibrium.  

Christine ambled out, in no particular hurry. 

Six, hacking away at the deathclaw, gleefully said “Wife!” 

“Wife. I think the most important question here is what the fuck you’re doing?”

Six paused, machete stuck in vertebrae. “If I bring Arcade back something cool he won’t be as mad at me.”

“Darling, why would I- that better not be all your blood.”

Six flinched away from her wife’s hand on her jaw and gave up trying to pull the machete out, aiming a hopeful kick instead. “See? Everyone is mad at me for getting hurt, which _I_ think is very backwards.” 

“How are you going to get all the way to Dogtown if you keep collecting scars at this rate?” Christine told her. 

Six rested her not-bleeding temple against her wife’s shoulder with a deep sigh. It was a rare public touch that wasn’t a quick hand or shoulder brush, but they technically weren’t in public yet, Blondie figured. The wives, out and about town were always in a tight orbit around a common center of gravity, touching constantly in telegraphed messages of brief pats-  coming behind you, I’m on this side, it’s just me, here I am.

“Do I have to pay Blondie in tequila to get the full story again- you look terrible, what happened to _you_?” 

“So I _can_ go?” Six interrupted Christine surveying Blondie with a worried frown, looking up with pleading eyes. 

Rex nosed under Christine’s hand. 

Christine ran her fingers behind his metal jaw. “We still need to talk more about that. Is Angel secretly injured but being brave about it?”

“We’re all walking, it’s fine. Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night nor bullets nor other death dealing devices will keep this courier from the swift completion of her appointed rounds, coming back to you.”

“And Veronica.” Christine said, giving up. “Not this conversation here, not this conversation now.” She took the heads off with one efficient swing. 

“ _Of course and Veronica!_ I married both of you!” Six said, stepping out of the spray.

“I was there, I remember.” 

“Can you take Rex home? And my bag? Nonononono, don’t open it here ,” she said, smacking the flap back down when Christine was curious about the heft. “Gotta wrap up today. And see Arcade.”

The wives got the head into a waxed canvas duffel bag Six produced out of nowhere. Blondie, adrenaline damped down by the Med-X, tuned out most of the very abbreviated stories about how the wives had spent their respective days, that a new NCR ambassador was expected to arrive tomorrow, and that Christine was out on the wall because Veronica planned on making some terrible sounds. 

Then they were through the gates, stepping into a crush of people who’d learned their savior was walking among them and had requests for her. The crowd parted for her, fast and quiet. Maybe it was the blood crusting down her jaw and spattering her armor. Maybe it was the look in her eye, glinting balefully under lowered sunglasses. Maybe it was her swagger that was more clearly a limp today. Maybe it was that she expected people to move out of the way and they usually did. She was only going half-speed today, which was fine by Blondie. She cut between a hooded someone with a pack of tall lean jackalope dogs and a woman carrying a crate of pigeons, ignoring sidewalks and heading for the Strip. 

* * *

This was exactly the way Blondie had first seen Six, stalking through the Tops Casino with a head while a ghoul crooned the same pre-War standard about the death of a bachelor. The blood trail was gone and it had of course been a different head.

Six had taken the Tops with three shots and one slash. She strangled Benny, then shot him where he’d shot her, then took his head off for easier portability. She walked calmly downstairs in a pre-War silk negligee and his suit jacket with a huge shock of blood across the lapel, grinned at Benny’s second, and said “My casino now.” She shot a Chairman who rushed her clean through the head, asked “Anyone else?” and went back to the front desk to retrieve all her weapons. Aside from that, it was a nonviolent takeover. 

Just over a year later, she shoved past the bouncers at the door. “How’s my casino, Swank?”

“Doin’ just the tops, never better boss,” he said, hastily closing a ledger. “You gotta follow the weapons check just like everyone else though-”

She burst onto the poolside with a mad light in her eyes. Arcade, chatting up a poolboy, turned in alarm.

"I got something REAL WEIRD to show you-" 

Arcade recoiled halfway over the side of the lounge chair, putting a protective hand over his glass.

“Is that a two-headed deathclaw? Wait, are you bleeding?”

“Oh, probably!’ she said cheerfully.

“Is _Blondie_ bleeding? Where else is everyone bleeding? From what?” he asked, putting his drink all the way down.

“He better not be.” Angel said, checking his handiwork.  

“That’s it, everyone to the clinic.” 

* * *

“Six, what the fuck.” Blondie briefly wondered if he could ever get away with telling Six, on the neighboring gurney, anything close to that as Arcade continued “You need stitches, an X-ray, I need to take blood to see if you caught anything from biting someone like a feral Raider, you’re probably dehydrated but at least that’s nothing new.”

Six managed to look smug but annoyed behind the towel she was holding to her scalp and the ice-cold Nuka Cola held to her throat.

“I don’t have time for all that shit, Arcade. I got things to do. Aren’t you supposed to triage? Shouldn’t you be taking care of the person who needs stitches first?”

“Both of you need stitches.” Angel watched Six decide not to bite Arcade as he chucked her under the chin.

“You-” addressing Blondie, finally looking properly at the sutures, “are...fine, actually. Call me if it gets worse.” He got more Med-X into Blondie before he could protest, and gave Angel an odd look. “Where’d you learn this technique?”

“Not here.” Angel said, packing his pipe.

Arcade spun to face Six again. “I need a blood sample. You’re not dehydrated? You’re not going to pass out on me?”

“I have no control over that.” 

“Well, here we go. No, don’t _look_ -” 

Blondie, getting his poncho back on, missed the small drama of Six slumping to the side and Angel barely catching her head and lowering her to the gurney. Arcade groaned but finished taking the sample. It ended up being two quick staples to her scalp that woke her up. 

Arcade continued as if she’d never fainted. 

“Six, do you know how many diseases are bloodborne? _All of them_. I don’t even know how to test for some of these things! What if he was rabid?” He handed her half a lowball of clear liquid to stop her from wheezing out an answer.

“What were you boys doing? Standing around looking pretty?”

She knocked it back in one smooth arc, frowned, and choked it down as Angel stayed expressionless and Blondie protested his innocence.

“This,” she wheezed, dropping the glass and missing the table entirely, not bothering to wipe away the drop running down her chin, “is water.”

Arcade looked up from disapprovingly watching the glass bounce off the oozing duffel bag, clink against the metal tin of salvaged glassware, and roll gently out the tentflap. 

“Thought it’d be some sort of healthful mostly-alcohol tonic.” she said with a peculiar emphasis on healthful. 

“Are you concussed again? What did she hit her head on?” He fished out a splintering novelty pen flashlight from the mysterious depths of his lab coat. Six automatically tried to break his hold on the back of her head. He pinned her with an elbow to the collarbone.

Angel paused in the middle of getting a light from Blondie. “Biting is a perfectly reasonable way to break a hold.”

Arcade couldn’t turn from holding Six down, but managed to stiffen in disapproval even more. “No smoking in my goddamn clinic. Furthermore, if you could all avoid getting covered in and ingesting the bodily fluids of-” Six was cough-wheezing laughter, turning away from the penlight. “Six, please-”

“Eeeeeeeeeeee,” she hiccuped, “they should be so lucky. Ow, ow, ribs!”

He straightened up from the gurney, and turned with a resigned sigh, shoving his glasses back up his nose.  “You need to come in tomorrow for an X-ray and another blood draw, I need one without a stimpak in your system. Hep B and C and HIV are the biggest worries right now, you’re always chewing on the inside of her lip. It’s a pretty simple blood test, but they need to be done over a period of six months. Here’s a note for Christine and Veronica. You should not leave the Mojave.”

“I’m a grown woman and I got here by myself,” trying and failing to smack the back of Arcade’s head.

“Doctor’s orders- accept other people’s help!” Arcade fired back, not looking up from his logbook.

In the middle of flipping him off, she realized it wasn’t effective and purred  “Oooh Doctor Gannon, yes _sir_  Doctor Gannon, anything you SAY DOCTOR GANNON-”

“Get out of my clinic,” he snarled lovingly, closing the notebook with a snap as Blondie scooped her up, stepped over the glass, and out into the evening.

“You’re going to pop those stitches!” he yelled after Blondie. 

“I am also going to bite you if you do not put me down,” Six said very slowly and seriously, squinting up at Blondie from his shoulder.

“Thank you- hey no-” Blondie handed her off to Angel.

She tried a swipe at Angel before he pinned her arm between them.

“Six, you might as well get your money’s worth out of us protecting your temporarily incapacitated ass.”

“You’re the biggest baddest thing in the Mojave otherwise.” Blondie agreed.

“Don’t you forget it,” she muttered, throwing her arm over her eyes against the sun and managing to punch Angel in the chest in the process. “Thank you.” she said under her breath.

Blondie patted her shin, dodging the kick.

She thrashed enough that Angel let her down, and she wobbled a little without Rex, but she was standing. 

“You’re not worried about Rex getting away?” Angel asked, keeping an eye on a kid running full-tilt up the road.

“What?Where would he even go, of course I trust my wife to bring our dog- oh. No. Do you see that kid running full-tilt up the road?”

The kid slid to a stop, whipping open a lapel to show a crudely-stitched numeral 6.

“Courier! He hasn’t left yet, but he’s gonna! Red saw him packing up through the back window!” 

“Any guards, anyone on the roofs?”

“No, the man who told him you were back left, then he put up the CLOSED sign! You better hurry!”

“Good work, Irregular! Arcade’s got your reward.”

“What’s the plan?” Blondie asked, trying not to look like he was leaning against the HISTORIC MORMON FORT sign. 

“What do you mean, what’s the plan? We’re dropping you off at the Wrangler and Angel and I are going to have a nice friendly quiet chat with dear old Doctor Rex.”

“Job’s not done. “ Blondie said.

“The job’s never done! There’ll be people trying to kill me until one of them finally does it. I’ve managed to stay alive without you boys for a number of years, I can do without one of you for a few hours.”

Both of them frowned at her.

“Look, none of us are going to die old in our beds. Besides, who would want to?” she asked, trying to throw a brittle grin back over her shoulder and giving up when she turned her head too much. 

It felt like it took longer to get to the far reaches of Freeside than it did to get to the museum. Six was far less effective at telling individual people to fuck off and let her pass than she was with large groups, but she did manage to keep most of them walking as they told her their life stories and completely unnecessary backstory for mundane and minor favors. 

ED-E hummed up when they were a mile away, beeping and spinning.

“Buddy, you look so fancy! Hey, where’s your license plate? And your stickers?”

The robot made the saddest noise Angel had ever heard.

Six pulled everyone into an alley, furious. 

“Record a message for Elder McNamara. Okay, on three- one, two three. McNamara, I am a hair’s breadth away at all times from burying your valley, and the only reason I haven’t done it yet is out of a favor to my beloved wives, _you_ know, the women you threw away? Put the fun things back on my robot NOW. End message. Okay, go back- no, wait!”

She pulled open a panel and groaned. 

“Addition to message- three, two, one. Are you that fucking hard up for supplies? Was I not clear enough when I said ‘Leave my robot the way it is but with better armor’?” 

She joined Blondie in slumping against the alley. 

“This doc better have some fucking Med-X.” 

* * *

Six was trying to despine a prickly pear and interrogate, an act that had historically not gone well for her. 

"Look, clearly you care a lot about this, and I do wish I also cared. But I don't. So! What’s your deal?”

Rex-the-human leaned forward as far as the handcuffs let him. “You killed the one man capable of bringing order to this wasteland and put yourself in charge. You’re not even good at it, you’re wasting everything. Degenerates like you belong on a cross.” 

Six jerked back, almost slipping off the counter, mouth curling in disgust. 

“I don’t know who you think is in charge of the Mojave, but it’s definitely not anyone here.”

“I don’t see anyone else in charge.”

“Again, great question, but it’s not me. I _am_ in charge of this room and your continued existence.” 

"Can we skip ahead to the part where you torture me to death?"

"Goodness no," she said, carefully lining up long cactus spines by viciously sinking them into a crack in the formica countertop. "I've never tortured anyone intentionally, that's what I have private contractors for. Now, are you going to talk about whatever pitiful dregs you’ve scraped out of the Colorado to irritate me? Or should I leave you alone with these two thoroughly unpleasant gentlemen here?"

Angel and Blondie, in opposite corners, flashed each other a look before Rex-the-human tried to twist a look back over his shoulders. 

Blondie had not signed up for this. Six wasn’t great at quick and clean deaths. She didn’t always rank collateral damage as a high concern. Sharp shot, sharp tongue, but effective. Certainly no worse than most of the guns for hire in the Mojave. 

Angel had not signed up for this. Six was certainly not the best person to run New Vegas, but she really wasn’t trying very hard. She was a hard woman in a hard town, and she’d earned his grudging respect. He didn’t get his hands dirty like this, though. Too messy, too involved. A short chase, a fast death, on to the next job.

Rex-the-human tried to slouch. “You’re dead before the year’s out- they’ll never let a woman run anything for long.” 

She’d been using a little pink-pearl-handled switchblade to break off spines at the base of the fruit with dull cracks, like pinkies snapping. She started flipping it end over end. 

Rex-the-human tore his eyes away from the flashing knife. “It doesn’t change the fact you’re relying on bluffs and misdirection. I’m barely bruised. You haven’t got it in you.”

“Bluffing implies a promise you can’t keep. I always keep my promises, because I make so few of them.”

“What are you going to do, acupuncture me to death?”

“Doc, I don’t much care for guns.”

This was news to Blondie and Angel. 

“Too impersonal. What’s the point of killing someone from forever away with a sniper rifle? They should know in their final moments what a terrible mistake they’ve made and who they’ve crossed. Seems only right that someone’s close by to witness their final moments.” 

Rex-the-human shifted back, spine straight against the chair as she got off the counter, still flipping the blade. 

She paced behind him and continued, “This little pearl-handled jobbie has killed the worst men in the Mojave. Benny, House... Caesar.”

She traced the knife down the back of his neck and sunk it into the back of the chair. Put a gloved hand on his throat, cupping his jugular like a lover. Hissed in his ear, so quiet Blondie and Angel had to strain to hear it, “You stop them moving, a shot to a joint or the gut, and then you get close enough to get at their throat. You take a man’s head off, you _know_ he’s dead. You know what it’s like to cut through bone, Doc. That bite, that crunch, watching the marrow bleed out?" 

She continued, conversationally, and traced down the first few vertebrae. “Lemme tell you, the most satisfying part about killing Caesar was getting through that last vertebrae in his neck, hearing that _pop_. So easy to cut through the rest of his neck, but the spine? The spine takes some effort. It’s very lucky for me, Doc, that you don’t have a spine, so this’ll be easier than anything I’ve ever done.” 

Rex-the-human did an admirable job of keeping most of the fear out of his voice. “ _Cedo nulli!_ ”

“I yield to no one,” Angel said, helpfully. 

“Oh, but you will.” she said, and hopped back up on the counter. 

Blondie went through four cigarillos and watched Angel out of the corner of his eye as Six intermittently flicked cactus spines past Rex-the-human’s face into the wall and tried every trick she knew. 

Angel’s face, in deep shadow like the detective holos he and Tuco had seen so long ago, was making his chest hurt. Maybe he needed more Med-X. 

Rex-the-human said, like he was explaining something to a toddler, “Here’s all you need to know, cretin: You’re wasting your time. The city is turning against you. You can’t run a city on card tricks and smiles for long.This time next month, you and the other two womens’ heads will be on pikes in front of the Freeside gates.” 

Six cocked her head, slow, and said like she was explaining things to a particularly dumb man, “Here are some things I know. You will not be buried. You will not move on. You will not meet Caesar in the afterlife.”

She put three bullets in his head.

She found no notes, no plans, and didn’t expect to. Slipped her sunglasses and a poker face back on as they left the clinic. Chugged along toward Freeside proper, a little slower.    

It wasn't until they were nearly at the Wrangler that Angel said "I don’t kill people for fun. I kill people for profit.” 

“Are you implying any of that was fun? Eliminating a man who tried to kill me is _fun_? If he didn’t want to die he shouldn’t have tried to kill me.”

“Would you have had us torture him?” Angel asked, point-blank as Benny's gun.

Six, adjusting her sunglasses, said “Physical torture’s not effective. You just say whatever you can to make it stop,” a little too casually. She peeked back over her sunglasses. “Would you have, if I asked?

Angel found himself unable to meet her gaze.

Blondie didn’t have the brainpower to pick a stance in this argument, and slipped inside the cool noisy relief of the Wrangler as Six is telling him something about sending over Med-X. He didn’t trust himself not to look at Angel right now, sure there’s some sort of unwanted emotion on his face.  

* * *

Christine was impatiently waiting for Six and Angel on the front steps, along with- who were these young idiots? oh, the young idiots from the other day that wanted to be the younger replacements of him and Blondie. 

Six’s Pip-Boy goes haywire again before she flicks it off.

Stopping both of them talking at once, she said “Unless it’s fire, flood, or blood, it can wait until tomorrow.”

“It’s...two of those things? Technically?” the blond one with the stupid coat said. 

Christine cut in. “Vault 34 is flooded with radioactive sludge, but there are people trapped inside.”

Six squinted at them, sitting down on the top step. “You’re awful employees. Why didn’t you get them out?”

“Remember that radiation you picked up in the sharecropper fields and tracked back to the pipes? Same radioactive sludge.”

“No, no, no, there’s gotta be a way. I can’t make it out there tonight, it’s going to have to wait. If I don’t lie down in the next five minutes I’m going to fall over again.”

“Again?” Christine looked angry and worried, a look Angel was familiar with. 

“I’ve fallen down lots of times. You know this.” Six lied. 

The two young idiots slowly backed away from Christine. “Come back tomorrow night.” Six told them, and remembered Angel was there. “Good job, you got me home, I’m fine.” 

Christine scoffed. “You are not fine.” 

“Wow, okay, I know we both think Veronica is the hot one but you don’t have to _say_ it-”  

Angel took this as his cue to leave. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the title is from Six's official theme song, FWTB (grandson remix) by yonaka. 
> 
> Re: the deathclaw: have you ever had VATS give you some information you really didn’t want to know?  
> Med-X is not very rare in the game, but seeing as it’s just morphine which is fairly rare in real life, I’ve adjusted the drop rates in this patch. 
> 
> There’s a sidequest where you can interrogate a Legion prisoner being held by the NCR. Some of Rex-the-human’s dialogue is yoinked straight from that. 
> 
> You have two options for finishing ED-E’s loyalty quest- let the Followers upgrade the blaster, or let the Brotherhood upgrade the armor in exchange for the data in its memory banks. Six has already had the blaster upgraded, but with either option you lose the fun license plate and stickers on it :(
> 
> The Vault 34 quest in this game decides if you save the five surviving inhabitants of the vault by pumping out the flooded reactor into the fields nearby, or close off the vault and eliminate the radiation leaking into the water supply.


End file.
